The European project, UNIVERSAL--Universal Exchange for Pan-European Higher Education, is an attempt to demonstrate an open exchange of learning resources (LRs) between higher education institutions across Europe. The goal is to create and manage an open market of learning resources by introducing a brokerage platform with a standard way of describing the pedagogical, administrative, and technical characteristics of learning resources. The system will enable institutions to enrich their curricula with remotely sourced material. It is intended to be compatible with a variety of similar models pursued by different institutions, including open universities and alliances between peer institutions. The business-to-business oriented brokerage will embrace offers, enquiries, booking, and delivery of LRs. This paper illustrates how the issue of providing a user-friendly access mechanism to learning resources has been addressed by UNIVERSAL. The focus is devoted to catalogue design: its creation, development, structure, and organization. Attention is also given to the automated categorization of learning resources within the category tree, creation, and maintenance of the catalog hierarchy. The described approach enables gradual automation of the categorization process: from manual to semi-automated, and finally to a fully automated categorization process. (Contains 14 references.) (AEF)