Since its founding in 1988, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has grown from a small group of 12 people to one of the largest and most heavily used information resources in biomedicine. James Ostell discusses some of the underlying principles used to organize and prioritize NCBI's efforts over that last decade. Those principles are illustrated by an architecture overview of the Entrez retrieval system, and examples of using NCBI resources to make discoveries. Finally some of the newer NCBI resources will be touched upon briefly and some future directions considered.