Use of CAIRS at the Tropical Development and Research Institute Library

The purpose of this paper is to describe the computer system implemented in the Library and Information Services Section of the Tropical Development and Research Institute (TDRI). The TDRI library serves staff at various locations and following several investigations of the library's requirements, and ways of satisfying these, a computer system using the CAIRS (Computer Assisted Information Retrieval System) software started to operate in 1984. The paper describes the structure of the TDRI records and ways in which the fields are indexed and provides several examples of output produced by the system.