An Infrastructure for an Electronic Market of Scientific Literature

The success of the Internet has brought a large quantity of providers offering search and delivery services for scientific literature. We observe the development of an information market, where the value of a piece of information is determined by the law of supply and demand. This situation raises questions as to the future of university libraries. The objective of this paper is to find answers to these problems and to develop an architecture for the integration of information services in the field of scientific literature under the premise of an open, heterogeneous and dynamic market. With the UniCats system, we provide an integration architecture that supports all, customers, providers, and the traditional library. Technical basis is the UniCats environment, a framework for communicating UniCats agents. The most important agent types are trader, wrapper and user agent.