Because digital libraries are expensive to create and maintain, Internet analogs of public libraries-reliable, quality, community services-have only recently begun to appear. A serious obstacle to their creation is the provision of appropriate cataloguing information. Without a database of titles, authors and subjects, it is hard to offer the searching and browsing facilities normally available in physical libraries. Full-text retrieval provides a way of approximating these services without a concomitant investment of human resources. This presentation will discuss the indexing, collection and maintenance processes, and the retrieval interface, to public digital libraries.