Where I am coming from

Where I am coming from

Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel

summary

• I am a trained economist.

• I built a digital library for economists, the RePEc digital library. It’s my main claim to fame.

• And then I became a library school professor.

• I am sometimes thought of as a technologist.

• But I have no formal computer science, nor LIS training.

RePEc History

• It started with me as a research assistant an in the Economics Department of Loughborough University of Technology in 1990.

• a predecessor of the Internet allowed me to download free software without effort

• but academic papers had to be gathered in a painful way

CoREJ

• published by HMSO

– Photocopied lists of contents tables recently published economics journal received at the Department of Trade and Industry

– Typed list of the recently received working papers received by the University of Warwick library

• The latter was the more interesting.

working papers

• early accounts of research findings

• published by economics departments – in universities

– in research centers

– in some government offices

– in multinational administrations

• disseminated through exchange agreements

• important because of 4 year publishing delay

1991-1992

• I planned to circulate the Warwick working paper list over listserv lists

• I argued it would be good for them– increase incentives to contribute

– increase revenue for ILL

• After many trials, Warwick refused.

• During the end of that time, I was offered a lectureship, and decided to get working on my own collection.

1993: BibEc and WoPEc

• Fethy Mili of Université de Montréal had a good collection of papers and gave me his data.

• I put his bibliographic data on a gopher and called the service "BibEc"

• I also gathered the first ever online electronic working papers on a gopher and called the service "WoPEc".

NetEc consortium

• BibEc printed papers

• WoPEc electronic papers

• CodEc software

• WebEc web resource listings

• JokEc jokes

• HoPEc

a lot of Ec!

WoPEc to RePEc

• WoPEc was a catalog record collection

• WoPEc remained largest web access point

• but getting contributions was tough

• In 1996 I wrote basic architecture for RePEc.

– ReDIF

– Guildford Protocol

1997: 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.

based on close to 1200 archives

• WoPEc

• EconWPA

• DEGREE

• S-WoPEc

• NBER

• CEPR

• Blackwell

• US Fed in Print

• IMF

• OECD

• MIT

• University of Surrey

• CO PAH

• Elsevier

to form a 825k item dataset

315,000 working papers

490,000 journal articles

1,850 software components

17,500 book and chapter listings

22,500 author contact and publication listings

11,500 institutional contact listings

RePEc is used in many services

• Econpapers

• Economists Online

• NEP: New Economics Papers

• Inomics

• RePEc author service

• IDEAS

• RuPEc

• EDIRC

• LogEc

• CitEc

… describes documentsTemplate-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0Title: Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal PolicyAuthor-Name: Thomas Krichel Author-Person: RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichelAuthor-Email: [email protected] Author-Name: Paul Levine Author-Email: [email protected] Author-WorkPlace-Name: University of SurreyClassification-JEL: C61; E21; E23; E62; O41 File-URL: ftp://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/

pub/RePEc/sur/surrec/surrec9601.pdf File-Format: application/pdfCreation-Date: 199603 Revision-Date: 199711 Handle: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601

… describes persons (RAS)template-type: ReDIF-Person 1.0

name-full: MANKIW, N. GREGORY

name-last: MANKIW

name-first: N. GREGORY

handle: RePEc:per:1984-06-16:N__GREGORY_MANKIW

email: [email protected]

homepage:http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/

mankiw/mankiw.html

workplace-institution: RePEc:edi:deharus

workplace-institution: RePEc:edi:nberrus

Author-Article: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:76:y:1986:i:4:p:676-91



….

… describes institutions

Template-Type: ReDIF-Institution 1.0 Primary-Name: University of SurreyPrimary-Location: GuildfordSecondary-Name: Department of EconomicsSecondary-Phone: (01483) 259380Secondary-Email: [email protected]: (01483) 259548Secondary-Postal: Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XHSecondary-Homepage: http://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/Handle: RePEc:edi:desuruk

origin of archives

Christopher F. Baum administers the setup of archives.

The bulk of archives are based with economics departments. They maintained by faculty or staff.

Some archives contain converted data from major providers such as commercial publishers, larger organizations such as the US Federal Reserve, and RePEc's own personal submission service, the MPRA.

collection of data

A special central archive collects all archive templates.

A purpose-written Perl script called remi, written and maintained by Sune Karlsson, builds the basic documents database from all archives.

This data is also available via ftp somewhere.

objectives

Early objectives are make as many possible of papers available freely

online organize a free metadata set for the discipline

The basic arguments behind the idea that both are realistic has been discussed elsewhere.

many archives

There are close to 1200 RePEc archives. Data is stored in attribute: value templates. Each archive requires

one archive template one or more series template

An archive may have document templates. All templates use a purpose-built format called

ReDIF, designed by Thomas Krichel.

Institutional repositories

Across the world libraries are working to build institutional repositories.

They try to store the academic output of the institution Research papers Student dissertations Learning materials Dataset

RePEc and IRs

In principle, RePEc appears like some sort of precursor to institutional repositories (IRs) before they started.

I doubt IRs can be called a success. But RePEc is still expanding. The priniciple difference is that RePEc has a

better service infrastructure than IRs have. It is also important that the services feed back

to the dataset.

important services EconPapers and IDEAS are web services CitEc forms citation data OAI PMH service NEP is a current awareness service MPRA allows individual to submit papers EDIRC has institutional data RePEc Author Service (RAS) is an author

identification service LogEc has usage statistics the humble service

CitEc

CitEc is an autonomous citation index for RePEc created and maintained by Jose Manuel Barrueco Cruz.

Results of the citation analysis used to be encoded in ReDIF, and made available in RePEc itself.

They are encoded in AMF (an XML format), and distributed separetely.

OAI-PHM gateway

It is maintained by Thomas Krichel. It offers a OAI-PMH interface to the boring part of RePEc.

It uses the AMF format, a format encoded in XML that is is similar to ReDIF.

There is a also the compulory OAI-DC format, but it is empty for some instances in the RePEc dataset.

NEP NEP: New Economics Papers is a current

awareness service for a part of the documents, the working papers.

It was created by and is maintained technically by Thomas Krichel.

All additions are filtered into 80 subject-specific reports that issue every week.

Computer learning helps editors, otherwise it would be too much work.

NEP creates a subject classification for parts of RePEc.

MPRA

In the early days the RePEc team allowed individuals to open personal archives.

We found out this was a bad idea. In 2005 Ekkehard Schlicht created the Munich

Personal RePEc Archive, an EPrints installation.

It was the first time that an institution officially committed to maintaining a part of the RePEc infrastructure (other than an archive).

EDIRC

EDIRC is the “Economics Departments, Institutions and Research Centers” list compiled by Christian Zimmermann.

It's a set of data and a service of the data. The data is redistributed in ReDIF form in a

special RePEc archive.

RePEc Author Service

This is where authors register themselves can claim associations between them and the documents.

The most frequent association type is authorship, hence the name.

RAS was created by Thomas Krichel. It is maintained by Christian Zimmermann. Most of the code was written by Ivan V. Kurmanov. The

The data is distributed in a special RePEc archive.

LogEc

LogEc is the king of RePEc user services. It compiles data on

abstract views full-text downloads

from participating services (EconPapers, IDEAS, NEP) and others.

the humble service

This service is so humble that it does not have a name.

Every month Christian Zimmermann sends out mails to all registered authors and all archive maintainers. He reports on the usage of items in RePEc as captured by LogEc.

ranking

Christian Zimmermann compiles rankings using the combination of RePEc, NEP, EDIRC, CitEc and LogEc data, at http://ideas.repec.org/top/

This shows you what RePEc is all about: a cross-penetration of data.

notable absences

RePEc has no organizational structure. It is not owned by anybody. It has no income or expenditure. While much of its revolutionary ideas have been

conceived by Thomas Krichel, it pretty much can live without him now.

assessment of RePEc

It not easy to assess RePEc against its original objectives.

Numerators are easy to evaluate, denominators are not.

The problem is the lack of good useable data about the denominator.

one good denominator

There is a list of 1000 most important ecenomists in the word by Tom Coupe.

It is over 10 years old Christian Zimmermann has matched names of

the Coupe list with RAS registrants. He found that more than 80% of the Copue's top 1000 are RAS registrants.

We can not reach 100%.

perception and communication RePEc is something of a nature that has not

been there before. It is not that hard to understand the nature of

the data and services that it provides. It is hard to understand how the thing works, or

what it actually is. It is probably the thing out there in digital library

land that is closesed to a miracle. Miracle are hard to explain eveny for miracle

makers.

lessons learnt

Performance metrics are crucial to bring in target community members into an academic publishing and documentation system.

We need a way to identify the units assessed authors institutions

We also need a some agreement about, and exchange data of, usage incidents.

author and institution registration

a&ir is an important enabling device. Registration sets up a factual claim that is

relavitively simple to check. Setting up a free system that enables free a&ir,

and redistributes the data freely is currently Thomas Krichel's main concern.

open library society

This is a 503 1 c charity set up by Thomas Krichel to support the work on the registration systems.

The purposes of the society are formulated quite generally. The society can support related purposes.

who is he?

he is "St. IGNUicus"

A humoristic creation of Richard M. Stallman (RMS)

RMS is the father of the free software movement

a geek

a visionary

St. IGNUicus shows an emphasis on the moral case for free software, rather than the business case

moral case and business case

Other folks in the free software movement avoid the "f" word

free can mean cheap

cheap can mean bad

They stress the business case of free software

They use the term "open source software", (OSS)

RMS and us

Amen, I tell you: we librarians need to learn more from the OSS movement.

We need to make the concepts coming of free software more a part of our business.

Let us look at a key concept: free software.

free software according to RMSFree software comes with four freedoms

The freedom to run the software, for any purpose

The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor

The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits

what has this to do with us?

Just replace free software with free information. Libraries are about free information.

But the analogy is not quite as simple.

When we talk about free information, we usually mean things that we can freely read (download…). free as in: $0

We do not usually mean free information as information we are free to do things with. Free as in freedom.

moral and business

There is a moral case for free information.

We rely on it.

There is a business case for free information.

We need to make our own.

we rely on the moral case

The citizen should be informed…

Individuals in the organization should have free access…

This is how we justify resources given to us.

Often, members of the community who pay get privileged access.

from moral case to business case

To form the business case for free information, think of "free information" as "freedom to do things" rather than $0.

Thus libraries can make a crucial business case for them as agents who transform information.

Recall that there are whole industries out there that produces free information.

what do open libraries do?

Identify records

Relate identified records

These actions require human control.

They prepare for assessment of performance.

key to success

Have a small group of volunteers

Disseminate as widely as possible

Demonstrate to authors and institutions that it works for them.

institutional registration

author registration

KEY idea 1

RePEc attracts a community of users and contributors

The community itself is the focus of attention

RePEc describes the living rather than the dead.

Forget about documents!

KEY idea 2

Forget about users!

Disseminate widely

Users will come through Google anyway.

And Google loves RePEc services

puts RePEc services top when the query consists of the name of an author

open library idea: serials data

Serial level information is a crucial component of academic library data.

Idea: build and maintain free serial records.

Two ways to build:

Use volunteers and collect in a decentralized way.

Make an expensive central collection, disseminate well, charge $$$ for record changes later.

another open library idea: law

Much of the legal texts are de jure free.

De facto there are two companies who have comprehensive collections and charge a lot of money for the free information bundled with proprietary information.

Our moral case calls for a replacement!

(it will also create jobs for us)

free legal open library

Have all laws and cases

online as text

identified & related

Have citation metadata, so that legal citations can verified be while composing case data.

Registration procedure to verify the integrity of data.

open library idea II: drugs

Collect data on the composition of all drugs

drugs composition reported by drug companies, using open archives

drug components documented by the governments, using an open archive

Open library brings the two together!

Am I crazy? Money does not make the world go round. Ideas do.

When RMS proposed a free replacement for UNIX in the early 80s, most people dismissed the idea.

Today it is reality!

Similarly, when I started to work on RePEc a totally free and improved A&I dataset in 1993, nobody gave it a high probability to succeed.

It is a reality!

obstacles to open librarieslack of imagination & entrepreneurship

inability to form alliances

user-centered thinking

document-centered thinking

technical competence required

OAI PMH

XML and XML Schema

Unicode

the "C" word

http://openlib.org/home/krichel

Thank you for your attention!

Documents

Where I am coming from