Is there a place for P2P

David Bigwood was thinking out loud the other day in his Catalogablog posting P2P OPACs

Here’s an idea, not even half-baked, how about peer-to-peer (P2P) networks of OPACs? Only available items would display. I’d get to pick the institutions I’d have display and whether to display non-circulating items. Something like Limewire.

Having struggled with the effects of teenage family members installing Limewire and its predecessors on the home PC, and with how we scale the traditional search of a single library’s collection up to a reliable performant query of information within overlapping ad hoc groups of library collections, I have also wondered if the P2P (peer-to-peer) technologies underpinning the former could be helpful with the latter.

David’s thought, of using P2P and the music sharing application Limewire as an example, when you deconsruct it is attempting to address a few well known problems in the library domain.

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