Since July 2008 the ILISI (Index of Italian Literature on Nursing Sciences) elaborated by the IPASVI nursing college of Rome has been available on-line at the page http://www.ipasvi.roma.it/ita/ILISI/ . The aim of this is to make Italian nursing literature more available and to favor bibliographic research. About 3000 articles and 30 nursing journals are available : the necessary software is open source (free) and has been adapted to allow searches by author, topic or word content. Indexation has been carried out by a group of volunteer nurses using a Thesaurus created by the project group. This article describes the aims of the project , how it has been created , the resources employed and the potential of the database. Use of the latter is on the increase: in fact, during the first 12 months of availability , the number of consultations reached 9000.