At the end of 70's the need emerged that single national states directly partecipate in the production of their own specialized databases. In those years the Universal Availability of Publications (UAP) project/aim was designed at IFLA, that included the need of promoting a world system for the sharing of bibliographic information and the development of interlibrary loan, but surpassing these concepts, and taking into consideration accessibility in all its aspects and at all levels. The current development of telematic nets and Internet wide diffusion raised the expectations of building a 'universal service'. The evolution of bibliographic systems and meta/union OPACs and the wide possibility of obtaining full-texts documents and non published material – grey literature and information through the Net, suggest new definition criteria for primary and secundary documents and new ways of considering the traditional functions for referring to and accessing content. The Web can be considered as a net of citations in which traditional documentary units and relative citations are replaced by web pages and relative hyperlinks. The 'Information Society Forum' (ISF), the main advisory institute of the European Union about the development of the information society, defined the 'universal service' as the set of needs and request of information and communication in the society for public and private interest. The new utopy, "a European way for the Information Society" now adds to, without replacing them, previous utopies in the studies about information and documentation.