As we begin to drown in the digital debris of our information powered lives, three distinct approaches have emerged to organize the Internet. The first is the commercial approach. The second is the volunteer approach. The third: the slowly emerging library-led approach.

Not much is known, much less achieved, of the library-led approach to internet organization. We have MetaData (Dublin Core), essentially a method to apply Dewey and Library of Congress subject classifications to the web. We also have the beginnings of many National Subject Gateways - essentially a method to apply topic specialization like that of specialty libraries, to the web.

Before I continue, I must express my own frame of reference. I am an avowed Information Liberator, a techy, a sociologist, a bit of a hacker-rebel, and one of the world's very best internet researchers. (Consider attending my one of my seminars one day.)

I do not work in the library establishment.

So what could I possibly say about the librarian community's emerging Internet development approach?

To start, we can gain a great deal of clarity by looking at other two approaches. Consider the commercial approach. For many companies, the Internet is a gold rush and they are the miners. From the behemoth of Yahoo, funded to the tusks by the stock market, to the market wanna-be's with little more than dreams of a future commercial payoff, everything is greased by the attention of potential consumers, or the interests of potential advertisers. Value is defined by the likelihood a visitor can be persuaded to purchase something, anything. This may appear brutal and heartless but a commercial effort must justify its involvement

Consider also, the Volunteer approach. The legions of volunteers with surplus time and expertise offered by internet aficionados the world over. These are the people who type in the thousands of classics into the book archives like Gutenberg Project or the Online Book Initiative so you can read the classics for free. These are the programmers who spawn cool programs to distribute songs of uncertain copyright. These same people work hard to link, organize and create roadmaps to the many resources online. Collectively, it represents an approach built, it must be said, as much on a love of chaos as a need to find something online.

The volunteer model... well, is rather chaotic. If you can prepare any kind of model which does not take money, can grow with little more than grass-roots enthusiasm and free promotion, then we are in. For the most part, it has to be small enough to be a personal effort and small enough to be done before I get bored and want to do something else. Still got something, and if it is just a little bit 'cool', then we will sign up in droves.

Back to the library approach. Yes, this bastion of publicly funded information workers are finally having an impact on the way we find information. State library book catalogues include links to Internet resources. The library makes incomplete efforts to organize some of the information guides - and better success chaperoning speciality libraries into becoming National Subject Gateways.

If eventually a clear development approach is to emerge, we can say a great many things that it is not going to be. It is not going to be another Yahoo or W3Virtual Library. These are essentially lists of resources. Volunteers are very good at creating lists. People who seek information often create lists as a by-product. Librarians certainly could too - but then it most certainly is not a new approach, nor particularly an effective approach. We can expect something better from the pool of the best information workers the world has available.