A Knowledge Ark is a collection of knowledge

Knowledge

Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...

 preserved in such a way that future generations would have access to said knowledge if current means of access were lost.

Scenarios where availability to information

Information

Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...

 (such as the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

) would be lost could be described as Existential Risks

Existential risk

Existential risks are dangers that have the potential to destroy, or drastically restrict, human civilization. They are distinguished from other forms of risk both by their scope, affecting all of humanity, and severity; destroying or irreversibly crippling the target.Natural disasters, such as...

 or Extinction Level Events. A knowledge ark could take the form of a traditional Library

Library

In a traditional sense, a library is a large collection of books, and can refer to the place in which the collection is housed. Today, the term can refer to any collection, including digital sources, resources, and services...

 or a modern computer database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

. It could also include images only (such as photographs of important information, or diagrams of critical processes).

A knowledge ark would have to be resistant to the effects of natural or man-made disasters to be viable. Such an ark should include, but would not be limited to, information or material relevant to the survival and prosperity of human civilization.

Current examples include the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure seedbank located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near the town of Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, about from the North Pole. The facility preserves a wide variety of plant seeds in an underground cavern. The seeds are...

, a seedbank

Seedbank

A seedbank stores seeds as a source for planting in case seed reserves elsewhere are destroyed. It is a type of gene bank. The seeds stored may be food crops, or those of rare species to protect biodiversity. The reasons for storing seeds may be varied...

 which is intended to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds (such as important crops) in case of their extinction.

A Lunar ark has been proposed which would store and transmit valuable information to receiver stations on Earth. The success of this would also depend on the availability of compatible receiver equipment on Earth, and adequate knowledge of that equipment's operation.

Other types of knowledge arks might include genetic

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

 material. With the potential for widespread personal DNA sequencing becoming a reality, an individual might agree to store their genetic code

Genetic code

The genetic code is the set of rules by which information encoded in genetic material is translated into proteins by living cells....

 in a digital or analog storage format which would enable later retrieval of that code. If a species was sequenced before extinction, its genome

Genome

In modern molecular biology and genetics, the genome is the entirety of an organism's hereditary information. It is encoded either in DNA or, for many types of virus, in RNA. The genome includes both the genes and the non-coding sequences of the DNA/RNA....

would remain available for study even in the case of extinction.