The FDA Information Retrieval System ( FIRSt: Available only to FDA users) was developed to facilitate rapid and comprehensive access to in-house and external scientific information for agency scientists. FIRSt is not a traditional information system which focuses on the storage and maintenance of data. Rather, it is a connectivity product which harnesses the innovative technologies developed for the World Wide Web (Internet). In its initial build (Phase I), FIRSt relied extensively on commercial off-the-shelf products developed for the Internet. This enabled the system to go from a concept to an operational prototype in about 10 months. By establishing the system inside the FDA firewall and implementing a number of other security measures, FIRSt both enables the sharing of data and the protecting of proprietary information from unauthorized access. Scientific information provided to the user in FIRSt includes in-house scientific databases, FDA expertise databases, a conferencing system, hyperlinks to important non-FDA scientific databases on the World Wide Web, commercial databases such as Internet Grateful Med, thesauri to aid in searching for documents, and government policy and regulatory documents.