The Text-Pac System is capable of generating indexes and bulletins to provide a current information service without the selectivity feature. Indexes of the accumulated data base may also be used as a basis for manual retrospective searching. The manual search involves searching computer-prepared indexes from a machine readable data base produced largely by human abstracting and indexing. Retrospective searching in the Text-Pac System provides computer matching of a machine-readable data base prepared by human abstracting and indexing against questions manually prepared and translated into the system language. The entire record is scanned for occurrence of the question words and the "hits" from this matching are obtained in the form of a computer printout. The logic and search strategy are the same as used for the Current Information Selection. (related reports are available as ED 044 120, and ED 044 121.) (Author/AB)