Using OAI-PMH Resource Harvesting and MPEG-21 DIDL for Digital Preservation

We propose involving the web server in the preservation process through “mod_oai”, an Apache module that (1) addresses the counting problem by using OAI-PMH to unambiguously list all canonical URIs at a website and (2) addresses the representation problem by providing an archive-ready representation of the web resource with a complex object format (MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL)) that captures both metadata generated by the web server at dissemination time and by the repository post-crawl.