I write with pleasurethis forewordto the proceedings of the 7th workshopof the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX). The increased adoption of XML as the standard for representing a document structure has led to the development of retrieval systems that are aimed at e?ectively accessing XML documents. Providing e?ective access to large collections of XML documents is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. INEX aims to provide the necessary methodological means and worldwide infrastructures for evaluating how good XML retrieval systems are. Since its launch in 2002, INEX has grown both in terms of number of p- ticipants and its coverage of the investigated retrieval tasks and scenarios. In 2002, INEX started with 49 registered participating organizations, whereas this number was more than 100 for 2008. In 2002, there was one main track, c- cerned with the ad hoc retrieval task, whereas in 2008, seven tracks in addition to the main ad hoc track were investigated, looking at various aspects of XML retrieval, from book search to entity ranking, including interaction aspects.