Dear All, It is nice that our friend Mr.Amin has initiated a debate on Article indexing. Our experience at IGIDR library tells us that the job of indexing journal articles will be more expensive than subscribing commercial indexing/abstracting journal. Inspite of having required human resource, it would be difficult to have wide coverarge and to maintain quality par with international indexing/abstracting journals. The cost has been calculated considering the total cost to the institution, which includes salary and other perks such as CPF, accomodation, medical allowance, Gratuity, bonus, LTC, etc paid to one full-time LIS professional. More over, the features provided in search interface such as SPIRS and OVID are are so wonderful, which our inhouse indexing system may not be able to provide. However, it is worth indexing such Indian journals not covered in International indexing journals either individually or as a cooperative venture. IndMed has launched free online service to provide index to Indian medical journals. (http://indmed.nic.in) IGIDR library during Sept, 2005, has launched a free online index service titled 'Open Index Initiative', which is a cooperative effort to index Indian social science journals consisting of index to articles, books reviews and conference papers. This is based on RePEc and DOIS models ( http://oii.igidr.ac.in) This email does not intend to suggest any library to stop indexing work, rather intends to just share our experience. thanks g.k.manjunath CHIEF LIBRARIAN INDIRA GANDHI INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH FILM CITY ROAD ( GEN.VAIDYA MARG ) SANTOSH NAGAR GOREGAON ( EAST ) MUMBAI - 400 065 INDIA e-mail : gkm@igidr.ac.in http:// www.igidr.ac.in/lib/library.htm phone 022-28490653 fax 022-28402752