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The RePEc model for the academic digital library

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work partly sponsored by the Joint Information Systems ... in February 1993 on a gopher server at Manchester Computing. ... static gopher/web pages ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: The RePEc model for the academic digital library


1
The RePEc model for the academic digital library
  • Thomas Krichel
  • http//openlib.org/home/krichel
  • work partly sponsored by the Joint Information
    Systems Committee through its Electronic
    Libraries Programme

2
Early history of my interest
  • 1991
  • Contents Warwick Working Paper acquisitions
    lists in CoREJ
  • Technology email lists
  • Idea distribute the acquisitions lists through
    email lists
  • leads to the foundation of BibEc
  • 1992
  • Contents Public domain software for TeX, emacs,
    etc
  • Technology anonymous ftp
  • Idea make papers available on public archive
    that are accessible on the Internet
  • leads to the foundation of WoPEc

3
The Foundation of NetEc
  • NetEc is a group of Internet-based services that
    help scholarly communication in Economics.
  • It was founded in February 1993 on a gopher
    server at Manchester Computing.
  • On the WWW since 1994,
  • mirrored in Japan and the United States since
    1995.
  • The initial services were BibEc and WoPEc.

4
The BibEc project 1993 to 1997
  • Based mainly on acquisitions data for printed
    economics working papers from the Documentation
    Center of the Economics department at the
    University of Montreal.
  • Run on a volunteer basis by Thomas Krichel and
    Fethy Mili
  • Holdings go back to the late 1980s, around 40,000
    items
  • data is converted to html and placed on a web
    server

5
The WoPEc project 1993 to 1997
  • Central collection of bibliographic data on
    electronic working papers
  • Initially unpaid volunteer work by José Manuel
    Barrueco Cruz and Thomas Krichel
  • In 1996--1998 JISC funding allows José Manuel to
    work full time on the project
  • 5,000 papers in 1997

6
BibEc and WoPEc 1993 to 1997
  • Data converted to a whois/IAFA like format
  • static gopher/web pages updated periodically
  • whois server (powered by digger of bunyip.com)
    with web-based fielded queries using an in-house
    query script
  • WAIS index of the full-text pages
  • WoPEc-announce and BibEc-announce mailing lists

7
Closely Related efforts 1993--1997
  • EconWPA
  • manually integrated into WoPEc since 1994
  • Fed in Print
  • manually integrated into BibEc and WoPEc since
    1994
  • departmental archives eg, Humbolt Universität,
    University of California San Diego
  • DEGREE
  • S-WoPEc

8
Related efforts Other NetEc projects
  • CodEc 1994--
  • Collection of computer code by Dirk Eddelbüttel
  • WebEc 1994--
  • Collection of WWW links to resources for
    economists, by Lauri Saarinen joined NetEc in
    1995
  • JokEc 1995--
  • Collection of jokes about economists, by Pasi
    Kuoppomäki, joined NetEc in 1997

9
Projects associated with NetEc
  • They are mirrored on the NetEc sites, but are not
    part of NetEc
  • Resources for Economists on the Internet by
    William L. Goffe
  • Economics Departments, Institutions and Research
    Centers (EDIRC) by Christian Zimmermann

10
Projects sponsored by NetEc since 1997
  • RePEc (1997--)
  • NEP (1998--)
  • HoPEc (founded 1997, reformed in1999, ongoing)
  • I will come back to these activities later.

11
Summary 1997
  • A plethora of services,
  • many live through centralized collection
    therefore not sustainable as the data mass
    increases,
  • most have specific user interfaces to their data,
  • many are mirrored.

12
Focus on the digital academic papers
  • BibEc and WoPEc were centralized collections of
    metadata about documents held at various archives
    and from various providers, they needed to
    decentralize.
  • In the early days of the projects, a distributed
    database approach was thought to be the way
    forward, for example using the whois protocol,
    or Dienst
  • an alternative approach would to collect all
    papers in one archive, the approach that works
    successfully for arXiv.org but unsuccessfully for
    EconWPA
  • Debate on centralized versus decentralized
    distribution

13
Bill Goffes vision 1995
  • What I would suggest is this a distributed
    system with any number of sites, each mirroring
    each other. archives could "join" the system
    (say it was written in perl so could run on NT as
    well as Unix). Then you'd have the best of both
    worlds Such a system could easily grow with
    the profession's use of the net. Such a system
    would GREATLY benefit the profession.
  • Bill suggested a system based on a system like
    usenet news.

14
The foundation of RePEc
  • Founding fathers the BibEc and WoPEc projects,
    DEGREE, S-WoPEc
  • two initial drafts by Thomas Krichel were revised
    at a meeting in Guildford in May 1997
  • ReDIF, a metadata format
  • The Guildford protocol, a convention how to store
    ReDIF on ftp or http servers

15
RePEc principle
  • Many archives
  • archives offer metadata about digital objects
    (mainly working papers)
  • One database
  • The data from all archives forms one single
    logical database despite the fact that it is held
    on different servers.
  • Many services
  • users can access the data through many
    interfaces.
  • providers of archives offer their data to all
    interfaces at the same time. This provides for an
    optimal distribution.

16
Many archives decentralize the collection of data
  • At the end of 1999, there are more than 100
    archives. Some are based with leading
    institutions (e.g. NBER, CEPR, US Federal Reserve
    Banks, OECD) and many small institutions (e.g.
    University of Salerno). There is some data from
    commercial publishers (e.g. Springer Verlag).
  • Example The RePEctky archive
  • ftp//ftp.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/pub/RePEc/tky
  • managed by cirje-dp_at_e.u-tokyo.ac.jp

17
to form one dataset...
  • over 80,000 items in over 1,000 series, contains
    working paper, published paper, software,
    personal and institutional data
  • largest distributed free source about online
    scientific publications, over 18,000 electronic
    papers
  • data is encoded using the purpose-built ReDIF
    format
  • all archives follow a convention called the
    Guildford protocol on how to store ReDIF files
    and other data on their servers. Therefore the
    archives can be mirrored.

18
used in many services.
  • BibEc and WoPEc
  • EDIRC
  • IDEAS
  • Decomate Z39.50 service
  • NEP New Economics Papers
  • Inomics
  • RuPEc
  • HoPEc

19
The ReDIF metadata format
  • relational metadata links separately described
    elements
  • Author-Name Thomas Krichel
  • Author-Handle RePEcper1965-06-05thomas_krichel
  • Handle RePEcsursurrec9801
  • Name Thomas Krichel
  • Author-Paper RePEcsursurrec9801
  • Handle RePEcper1965-06-05thomas_krichel
  • shipped with syntax and relational control
    software

20
Personal and institutional data
  • Since October 1999 the HoPEc service allows
    persons to claim relationships between them and
    the resource data in RePEc. For example a person
    can say that she is the editor of a series. The
    HoPEc project associates handles with
    individuals. These handles could be useful in
    many other circumstances, for example conferences
    and scholarly society membership lists.
  • Many registering authors are able to give the
    EDIRC handle of their institutional affiliation

21
Areas not covered by RePEc
  • No statistical dataset information
  • No overall preservation strategy
  • No overall usage logs across all services this
    would be difficult to do
  • No explicit peer-review services based on RePEc
    data but that will change.

22
The RePEc vision
  • It is a collaborative effort of community wide
    knowledge sharing by discpline champions and
    librarians.
  • Once a critical mass of data and user services is
    reached outsiders face strong incentives to
    contribute.
  • The relational features allow to share the burden
    of cataloguing and reduce the cost of keeping the
    collection up-to-date.
  • RePEc promotes free exchange of data between
    academics.
  • It fights the division of the world in
    information-rich and information-poor.

23
My ongoing work
  • Introduce autonomous citation analysis for RePEc
    papers (funding decision pending)
  • Build new datasets that use the same collection
    principles
  • ReLIS for Library and Information Science
  • ReCMaP Computing, Mathematics Physics
  • ReSoS for the broad social sciences
  • Devise a syntax-independent and object-oriented
    version of ReDIF

24
But I can not do all this while being a lecturer
in Economics...
  • Conclusion
  • Hire me!
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