Abstract. The transition from traditional paper libraries to digital libraries enables new strategies for the use and maintenance of artifact collections. Distributed software development can be regarded as a special case of digital library utilization, where developers or groups of developers are working on the same software geographically dispersed in time zones which might differ. We present a hierarchical super peer network which represents the organizational structures of distributed software development in a natural way and is able to integrate distributed resources like version control systems as well as local devices. This approach is then generalized to support the self-organization of widely distributed, loosely coupled, and autonomous digital library systems.