Working toward the goal of an automatic indexing system which is truly competitive with human indexing in cost, time and comprehensiveness the Machine-Aided Indexing (MAI) process was developed at the Defense Documentation Center (DDC). This indexing process uses linguistic techniques but does not require complete syntactic analysis of sentences by the computer. The individual words are read into the computer and are either held for further consideration or eliminated. Lexical items (comma, periods and special symbols) are recognized. The output is a list of candidate index terms and a screened exception list of terms and phrases for human review. Eventually the list of candidate terms will enter an Integrated Language Data Base which is capable of posting terms directly to the data base, switching synonyms to postable terms or listing unrecognized terms for technical consideration. The step-by-step indexing procedure follows an overview of the entire process. (NH)