Enhancing Information Dissemination in Economics with RePEc


Session to be presented at Computing in Economics and Finance 2000
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
July 2000


organizer and chair: Christopher F Baum, Boston College
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1.  HoPEc: A Personal Registration System for RePEc
 
Markus Klink and Thomas Krichel (University of Surrey)
 
In conventional digital libraries, personal data (about authors,
editors etc) is represented by a set of characteristics that
are static. They are gathered when the bibliographic record is created.
They are not updated as time goes by. In this paper
we present HoPEc, a service to  collect  personal records 
that are integrated with the RePEc digital library for Economics.
Academics are invited to register using the service. Registration opens
the opportunity to create associations between a registrant's record
and non-personal data elements that are identified
in the RePEc dataset. The latter may be papers, journals, computer
programmes etc. Authorship for a paper or editorship of a journal
are examples for associations that may be created. If the registrant's
record is being kept up to date, users of RePEc-based user services
will be able to find the current personal data despite the
fact that the personal data that is included in the bibilographic
item may be outdated.
 
In this paper we discuss the conceptual, technical and social aspects
of HoPEc.

  corresponding author
 
  Thomas Krichel
  Department of Economics
  University of Surrey
  Guildford GU2 5XH
  England
  Phone: +44(0)1483 876958
  Email: T.Krichel@surrey.ac.uk
  http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk


2.  Promoting Research on Banking Supervision with RePEc Archiving Tools

Geoffrey Shuetrim  (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority)

In this paper, I will briefly motivate the need for research in the prudential
supervision field. I will then discuss the budget constraints on research
activity within prudential supervisors to motivate the need to collaborate
between international supervision agencies and to motivate the need to leverage
the research expertise and resources of the academic community.
Next I will describe the way that RePEc archives of research papers,
programs, data etc could be used to facilitate this pooling of resources.
Focus will be placed on: the types of information that can be shared;
the increased ability to engage in multi-country studies; and the ability to
provide common search facilities over those archives within the RePEc system
that are related to the issues of prudential supervision.


Geoffrey Shuetrim http://www.apra.gov.au/ 
Australian Prudential Regulation Authority                 
*   (02) 9210 3345     * (02) 9210 3022
* geoffrey.shuetrim@apra.gov.au



3. Enhancing Information Flow in Economics via Linked Metadata Archives 

Christopher F. Baum (Boston College) and Nicholas J. Cox (University of Durham)

The existing RePEc system provides researchers with access to bibliographic
information describing tens of thousands of working papers and an increasing
number of published journal articles. Unlike archives used in high-energy
physics and computer science, RePEc archives are decentralized and linked,
allowing each department or research institute to establish and maintain its
own contributions to the worldwide collection, which operates with a minimum of
central supervision and support.

In this paper, we discuss the extensions of this system to metadata that may
also be manipulated by economic programming languages: computer software and
datasets. We present a case study of the authors' implementation of archutil, a
set of Stata routines to provide access to RePEc templates describing Stata
statistical software components from within Stata, and its interaction with
IDEAS, a end-user service for searching the metadata. We consider the potential
for extensions of the metadata concepts to statistical datasets, also
accessible from within 'net-aware' Stata, which may be fruitfully organized and
cataloged by RePEc templates. 


Corresponding author:
Christopher F Baum
Department of Economics
Boston College
Chestnut Hill MA 02467-3806 USA
tel +1-617-552-3673
fax +1-617-552-2308
email baum@bc.edu
http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-v/baum.fac.html
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