General Periodical Indexes on CD-ROM.

Because general periodical indexes are an important way of providing access to the library collection and are used heavily, they are a natural product for CD-ROM. Products from 4 major companies - EBSCO Electronic Information, H. W. Wilson Co., University Microfilms International (UMI), and Information Access Co. - are compared. All of the products examined feature extensive help screens, all follow the standard convention of displaying the most recent citation first, and all use the Esc key to move up through the menu hierarchy. H. W. Wilson's Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and Readers' Guide Abstracts allow patrons access to many databases while learning only one system. UMI's Periodical Abstracts and Resource/One CD-ROM indexes offer one search mode, but the uncluttered screen offers automatic searching for singular and plural word forms, full Boolean logic, and a full range of proximity operations.