Prof. Jim Pitman
Statistics Department
367 Evans Hall # 3860 
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860
U.S.A. 


This is a statement from representatives of the RePEc digital 
library, see http://repec.org. 

We support the BKN proposal. We are ready to commit resources to
support the integration of RePEc data into a BKN node. As such we will
deliver our data, in its native ReDIF form or in AMF to systems where
further processing relative to the work on the node is taking
place. Data that we will contribute include, but are not necessarily
limited to the following

* publications data
* institutional data
* author data
* usage data
* citation data

We also commit to supporting any software that would be developed as
part of BKN to support our node. By supporting the software means that
we will be running the software on one of our servers, feed it with
our updated data, and fix bugs.  We will run the software at the end
of the BKN funding period, and hopefully, much earlier than that.

RePEc draws on almost 15 years of experience in working towards
freely available, decentralised academic resource description. As
economists, we have a fairly clear sense of business development.
We hope that our advice can be useful for the development of the BKN.


Christopher F. Baum, Boston College
Sune Karlsson, Orebro University
Christian Zimmermann, University of Connecticut