The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) provides access to biomedical journal literature through the analytical efforts of highly trained, professional indexers. Indexers review documents by hand to allow the NLM to deliver electronically searchable bibliographic citations, document descriptors, and limited author abstracts. As more and more documents become available electronically, automated techniques for accessing biomedical information are required.

The Indexing Initiative investigates methods to develop automated and semi-automated techniques for indexing biomedical literature. Automated methods developed and implemented within the Indexing Initiative will have an important impact on NLM's ability to continue to provide high-quality, reliable data to its constituents.