The National Library of Medicine is building a comprehensive online database containing bibliographic references to bioethics information. Interdisciplinary issues on ethics and public policy on topics such as patients rights, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia, AIDS, and organ donation and transplantation are but a few of the important areas covered by this database. Crucial to the building of the database, known as BIOETHICS or BIOETHICSLINE is the acquisition of indexing of material not in the collection of the National Library of Medicine. This might include newspaper articles, court decision, monograph chapters for general ethics publication, etc. The contractor, through its Kennedy Institute of Ethics, has the resources to determine which items should be included in the database. It also is a leader in the development of vocabulary terms to describe the bioethics literature and in training users in the application of these headings to search the BIOETHICS database. Through this contract effort, NLM intends to enhance the quality of the BIOETHICS database, strengthen it MeSH vocabulary in bioethics and to utilize the Kennedy Institute staff to assist in training efforts.
