OverCite: a cooperative digital research library

CiteSeer is a well-known online resource for the computer science research community, allowing users to search and browse a large archive of research papers. Unfortunately, its current centralized incarnation is costly to run. Although members of the community would presumably be willing to donate hardware and bandwidth at their own sites to assist CiteSeer, the current architecture does not facilitate such distribution of resources. OverCite is a proposal for a new architecture for a distributed and cooperative research library based on a distributed hash table (DHT). The new architecture will harness resources at many sites, and thereby be able to support new features such as document alerts and scale to larger data sets.