I did work at NetworkWorld in the late 90's. One of the tasks I was involved in was replacing all their macs with Windows 95 machines (with the exception of some art folks). After that was accomplished they went to a publishing system based on NT and Word Macros.

This was right around the time when word macros were the rage. It was a nightmare. You'd get one macro virus, and in an hour the entire company would have it.

Are they all really switching back to macs? And if so, I am glad to hear they finally junked that crappy publishing system. I am sure the only reason they didn't kill that project on week 2 was because they would have to admit they threw hundreds of thousands of dollars into a bad product.

I highly recommend greasecar.com. I got and installed the kit after reading a /. article about them two years ago. I've got thousands of miles on my greasecar and it still runs great.

What about hooking this sort of database to something similar to friendster or livejournal so that people offer their items up for loan to the people (and possible groups/communites) that they choose? Then it is up to the individual to decide how distributed their library really is.