User Interfaces for CD‐ROM PACs

The user interface, in broad terms, is the medium through which the user and the information come together. The types of searches a public access catalog (PAC) can perform are defined by the indexing strategy and retrieval software. The way the user's interest is communicated to the retrieval software and the way the results are communicated to the user is, by a more narrow definition, the interface software. Both the kinds of searches that can be performed by a variety of CD‐ROM PACs and how their workstations are used to accomplish the searches are considered.