On one of the lists I'm on, the Distributed Library Project has come across the wire. It's an interesting idea, although currently isolated to the SFBay area.
Conceptually it's intriguing - members of the project develop catalogs of their owned resources into a centralized database, which is then available to participating members for searching. I spent a little time thinking about similar things a while back (well, a good while back it seems...).
The DLP is conceptually similar though not as distributed as I had in mind, though. Certainly something to be looked at along the lines I had been thinking. I do fear it's frontloaded with a bit of political cant about libraries as non-communitarian which troubles me... Because at least in my memory, libraries can be hubs of community and shared knowledge resources. Some of the political aspects at the high levels may appear to be conflicted about this role, but when we go to the library, we take part in that community. The libraries in Chicago are part of reading group programs, host homebuyers workshops, provide space for tax assistance every year, and more.
Technologically it would be interesting for DLP to interact with the isbn.nu or allconsuming.net folks as well, though the aims are somewhat orthogonal; they have sorted out some of the issues in vending isbn or asin oriented data, though, which could be a help to the DLP.
And any way I look at it, I still don't have a catalog of my many owned media items....
