AM.Closely related to this effort is our aim to establish a modern library center on Complementary Medicine whichoffers the complete spectrum of a modern digital library including a document delivery-service for physicians,therapists, scientists and researchers.BackgroundThe term ’Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)’ covers a variety of approaches to medicaltheory and practice such as homeopathy, herbal medicine, naturopathy, anthroposophical medicine, tomention but a few, which are commonly not accepted by representatives of conventional medicine [1]. Incontrast to this definition, several investigations have shown a rise in the use of CAM in almost all westernindustrial countries in the last two decades [2, 3]. Many complementary therapies have therefore been thesubject of medical research. One very important step in the research on CAM in Germany were thegovernment funded projects ”’Unconventional Methods in the Fight against Cancer”’ (Germanabbreviation: UMK) and ”’Unconventional Medical Approaches”’ (German abbreviation: UMR) from1986-1996 [4, 5]. In total, 31 projects were funded by these initiatives which eventually resulted in theestablishment of a number of small research groups. These concentrated on special areas of CAM andmanaged to build up an academic research network [6]. However, they soon realized that the majority ofCAM research publications were (and still are) difficult to find in electronic databases like MEDLINE. Thisis due to two major factors:1. CAM-Literature is widespread