Text collections have traditionally been located at a single site and managed as a monolithic whole. However, it is now common for a collection to be spread over several hosts and for these hosts to be geographically separated. In this paper we examine several alternative approaches to distributed text retrieval. We report on our experience with a full implementation of these methods, and give retrieval efficiency and retrieval effectiveness results for collections distributed over both a local area network and a wide area network. We conclude that, compared to monolithic systems, distributed information retrieval systems can be fast and effective, but that they are not efficient.