Freelib: A Peer-to-Peer-Based Digital Library Architecture

Despite the creation of many digital libraries, there exists considerable untapped content with individuals in diverse communities. One major hindrance to dissemination is the centralized frameworks under which digital libraries are organized and deployed, thus limiting their accessibility, particularly in publishing. We have developed Freelib, a peer-to-peer-based digital library, which is self-sustainable and supports evolving communities with diverse interests. Freelib is built upon the existing work in the areas of OAI (Open Archive Initiative), and peer-to-peer and social networks. The key concept of Freelib is to dynamically form virtual communities based on users' common interest. In order to achieve this, the Freelib client analyses user access patterns and connects itself to other clients, the users of which show similar interest. In this paper, we present architecture of Freelib and report on its performance evaluation. We have built an event-based simulator, which enabled us to simulate networks of thousands of users. We study the performance gain of using Freelib over using small-world peer-to-peer networks alone. The performance evaluation shows that Freelib has significant performance gain over those networks in terms of recall, network bandwidth, and search response time, with minimal cost on the part of the end-user of the system.