Personal Data in a Large Digital Library

The RePEc Economics library offers the largest distributed source of freely downloadable scientific research reports in the world. RePEc also contains details about Economics institutions, publication outlets and people working in the field. All this data forms a large relational dataset. In this paper we describe HoPEc, a system that allows to implement access control records for personal data within RePEc. The bulk of these data describe the authors of documents. These data are maintained by the authors themselves. We discuss the technical and social aspects of this system. This paper is available online at http://openlib.org/home/krichel/phoenix.html. The work discussed here has received financial support by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK Higher Education Funding Councils through its Electronic Library Programme. Markus J.R. Klink is especially grateful for the support and helpful comments of his supervisor Stefan Kuhlins of Mannheim University. Thomas Krichel thanks the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey for sponsoring his attendance at ECDL2000. All authors are grateful to an anonymous referee who has made excellent suggestions that helped to improve this paper.