GAIA is developing a Generic Architecture for Information Availability, to support electronic brokerage. The GAIA architecture facilitates location and delivery of information, content, and digital services, through a scaleable brokerage model broadly applicable to distributed information supply chains and networks. The project is demonstrating applicability in three domains: Music, Publishing, and Technical Data. The advent of broadband communications, the explosion in Internet access, and the promise of electronic commerce gives great potential to the market for electronic brokerage. The sector and Supplier independent GAIA architecture supports an information society in which Information Brokers offer service economies and refinements that enhance the supply chain to the advantage of both suppliers and consumers. The service recognises the critical features of the digital economy: content sources and format will remain heterogeneous, information needs will be satisfied through proactive and reactive means, no player should be constrained to a single role and no role should be monopolistic, quality, completeness, pervasiveness and independence of service will be differentiators. GAIA’s Reference Model is a generic framework for information brokerage systems. The GAIA Standard describes the GAIA brokerage system in particular and is a specialisation of the GAIA Reference Model. The principal services covered by the GAIA Standard are: discovery of information, goods & services, location of suppliers, negotiation of service level in terms of quality, delivery & price, delivery in the digital domain, authentication, tariffing & payment management. Central to the approach taken by GAIA is the development of generic tools within the GAIA architecture to provide key reusable services, including user access components and mechanisms to use data from existing repositories. The involvement of representative bodies and user communities in trials of the GAIA service is validating the GAIA architecture and contributing to the establishment of business cases for information trading.