Peter B. Danzig, Jongsuk Ahn, John Nell, Katia Obraczka Computer Science Department University of Southern California Los Angeles, California 90089-0782 danzig@ usc. edu

Despite blossoming computer network bandwidths aud the emergence of hypertext and CD-ROM databases, little progress has been made towards uniting the world’s library-style bibliographic databases. While a few advanced distributed retrieval systems can broadcast a query to hundreds of participating databases, experience shows that local users almost always clog library ret rieval systems. Hence broadcast remote queries will clog nearly every system. The premise of this work is that broadcast-based systems do not scale to world-wide systems. This project describes an indexing scheme that will permit thorough yet efficient searches of millions of retrieval systems. Our architecture will work with an arbitrary number of indexing companies and information providers, and, in the market place, could provide economic incentive for cooperation between database and indexing services. We call our scheme distributed indexing, and believe it will help researchers disseminate and locate both published and prepublication material.