A Utopian place of criticism? Brokering access to network information

The management of autonomous, heterogeneous network resources and services provides new challenges which libraries are now addressing. This paper outl ines an approach based on the construction of broker services which mediate access to resources. It outlines a framework - the MODELS Information Arch itecture - for thinking about the components of broker services and their l ogical arrangement. It describes several development projects and services which show how brokers are developing. It uses examples drawn from the seri als environment to describe some of the issues.