Cataloging Economics Preprints

SUMMARY Cataloging resources that assist in educating a domain specific community can require a finer level of granularity than objects that arc to be accessed by a more general domain community, and can become a costly process. One possible approach towards cataloging such resources is to get a community of providers involved in cataloging the materials that they provide. This paper introduces RePEc (http://netec.wust.edu/RePEc) as an example tor such an approach. RePEc is mainly a catalog of research papers in Economics. RePEc is based on set of over 80 archives, which all work independently but are interoperable. The key issue of the paper is to evaluate the success in providing data of reasonable quality a decentralized approach.