Information or directory services are fundamental to any distributed system. Each distributed environment combines different technologies and standards for publishing, searching and communicating with its information services. For cross-environment application development and deployment, the differing technologies and standards present a serious hurdle. This work describes the initial stage of a project called the Universal Information Service Browser (UISB). The UISB defines a framework for browsing and interacting with a number of information services, such as UDDI and the Jini Lookup Service. This framework is implemented within an integrated development environment called Eclipse. We have organised the paper as follows: part one examines the problem area, our motivation, and potential solutions. The second part of the paper briefly details and outlines the UISB architecture and technical infrastructure. The third and fourth sections discuss the architecture and implementation work that we have accomplished so far. Finally we summarise our early experiences and outline future work.