While at Surrey, he became increasingly involved in the dissemination of economics research papers on the Internet. He developed several innovative new avenues for the global sharing of information in the field of economics.
In February 1993 he founded the NetEc (Networked Sources for Economics, http://netec.wustl.edu), a group of information services for economists on the Internet.

In April 1993 he established WoPEc (Working Papers in Economics, http://netec.wustl.edu/WoPEc.html), the first on-line collection of papers in the discipline.

In May 1997 Dr. Krichel founded RePEc, (Research Papers in Economics, http://www.repec.org) a comprehensive public-domain index to economics, its papers, researchers, publication channels, and institutions. RePEc contains the largest distributed source of free academic digital documents in the world.

RePEc is an example of Dr. Krichel's "open library" concept. An open library is one to which outside sources may contribute and from which many user services can be created. This concept has recently been taken up by the international Open Archives Initiative.*

Dr. Krichel was born in Germany in 1965 and studied economics and social sciences. He has earned degrees from the Universities of Toulouse, Paris, Exeter and Leicester, the latter of which was a Ph.D. in economics. He has published in leading academic journals in economics, including The Economic Journal, Economics Letters, the Scandinavian Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Regional Science.

As a professor at the Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Dr. Krichel will teach courses in digital libraries at the Palmer School's Brookville, Manhattan, and Westchester campuses. He will also continue to conduct research into conceptual frameworks and software tools for the creation and maintenance of open libraries.

For additional information about The Palmer School, Dr. Krichel, or his work, please call Dr. Krichel at (516) 299-2843.

* The Open Archives Initiative was launched in October 1999 to promote the development of innovative globally networked information services. It is run by a steering committee consisting of information technology specialists from the U.S. Library of Congress, the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK, Harvard University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Digital Library Federation (DLF), Cornell University, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany, and others. It is funded by the Digital Library Federation, the Coalition for Networked Information and grants from the U.S. federal government.