1. INTRODUCTION

The Internet is growing at a phenomenal rate, with no deceleration in sight. Every month thousands of new users are added. New networks are added literally almost every day. In fact, it is entirely conceivable that in the future every human with access to a computer will be able to interact with every other over the Internet and her sister networks. However, the ability to interact with everyone is only useful if one can locate the people with whom they need to work. Thus, as the Internet grows, one of the limitations imposed on the effective use of the network will be determined by the quality and coverage of Directory Services available.

Directory Services in this paper refers not only to the types of services provided by the telephone companies' White Pages, but to resource location, Yellow Pages services, mail address lookup, etc. We will take a brief look at the services available today, and at the problems they have, and then we will show how the X.500 standard solves those problems.