In recent years peer-to-peer networks have developed from unstructured to structured overlay networks. Structured peer-to-peer overlay networks facilitate a bounded number of messages in the number of peers for querying and publishing content opposed to unstructured networks, which usually flood the network with messages. To prevent the messages from overflooding the network they have a bounded life time, which may cause that some published content will be lost. Structured peer-to-peer networks guarantee that all published content can be found. One well known structured overlay network is the chord distributed hash table. An implementation of chord is only available in C, but not in Java, which is used widely and often in computer science education. This manual describes an open source implementation of chord in Java - called Open Chord - and how it can be used in Java-based applications. It provides a console-based experimentation environment to explore the functionality of chord, as well.