An Infrastructure for an Electronic Market of Scientific Literature Michael Christoffel, Jens Nimis, Bethina Schmitt, Peter C. Lockemann Fakultät für Informatik, Universität Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany {christof, nimis, schmitt, lockeman}@ira.uka.de Sebastian Pulkowski University Library, Universität Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany pulkowsk@ira.uka.de Abstract 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. Keywords: information market, digital libraries, service integration, electronic commerce infrastructure 1. Introduction Information has become one of the most important goods in the modern society. Conse- quently, accessing and providing information has become an important and lucrative business. This trade with information underlies the same rules as the trade with traditional goods, and we observe the development of an information market, which is dominated by factors like cost, price, consumer value, ease of access, delivery times, and the quality of the information. This development does not stop in front of scientific literature supply. Even traditional institutions like university libraries cannot ignore this market and are going to loose their monopoly of assisting university members to find the required information. They have to face the new situation and support their academic clientele with new services. One change that undergoes traditional marketplaces also emerges in the information market: The pure delivery of a good is only a small part of what customers demand. It is the whole range of accompanying services that determine the value of this good. In the scientific and university area, scientists and students depend on the supply with infor- mation and on worldwide information exchange. Due to the success of the Internet and the World Wide Web, scientists and students have electronic access to a large quantity of providers offering information services all over the world. Searching, ordering, and, often, delivery can be done with- out leaving the work desk. Traditional libraries and bookstores are supplemented by new services: Internet bookstores, bibliographic databases that offer a huge amount of references and documents, technical report servers, publishing houses that market their books and journals on their own, delivery services that send documents by fax or by e-mail, and electronic journals. Just because the information is now available electronically does not mean that the providers offer their services for free. Scientific literature continues to command a price, but now the players