Indexing is a highly skilled and vital part of any useful database. Staff time and skills will need to be allocated to that task. Indexing has been one of the most difficult aspects of our computerisation. Teaching people to index accurately and concisely is particularly difficult. It is a task few people enjoy doing and, therefore, few people understand the importance of indexing.
Indexing is also very subjective as no two indexers view a document in the same way.
With poor indexing, documents can become very hard to recall. In conclusion, I would like to assert that a fully indexed full-text database is an essential part of our information service. Treasury staff like the facility of having all types of information available in the one database. It is a mixture of full-text Treasury generated material and bibliographic external material. We are experimenting with scanning documents into the database and perhaps at next year's conference I can share with you the successes and pitfalls of scanning and imaging.