The efficient use of network capacity strongly depends upon the path selection procedure. In this paper we propose and evaluate efficient path selection algorithms for survivable optical networks with shared protection. Two distributed path selection algorithms are presented. The first approach maintains global information on network resource usage to determine link sharability and compute optimal shared paths. The second approach, however, only relies upon local information maintained at each node. Subsequently, we present an analytical model to evaluate the performance of these path selection algorithms and show its accuracy through numerical examples.