The Magazine Bibliography is a resource which enables the user to find information from magazines by looking up references in a large database of material. The database relates to items from every page, other than advertising, of Acorn User, Micro User, Beebug, A&B Computing and Educational Computing. Any information, be it an article, a letter from a reader, editorial or news columns, will be noted and a brief description given of the information available.

It is this brief description that is the key to the whole business. Jim McHugh, who runs the whole show, has cleverly contrived his abstracts so that they contain the maximum number of 'keywords' that relate to the item being studied.

When searching the database, one is able to search either all or only part of it - for example, one may know that an item has appeared this year so there is no necessity to search back three years - and there one defines either one or two keywords or part words or phrases that the search is to be made on.

As an example, one may want to find out about the use of networks in schools. If one entered 'school networks' as the search string this would be ineffective, but 'school' and 'network' or even just 'net' would pull in items with any occurrence of both of those elements in them. All it needs is for the user to then turn to the appropriate issue of the magazine and find the right page.

The output may be to a printer or to the screen. It is really more effective to the printer, however, since the searches tend to throw up an awful lot of material - hardly surprising when one considers that there are four sides of 80-track disc full of data for this package, and it's growing every month.

McHugh does an update service and you can become part of his regular mail service simply by writing to him. It may at first seem that the package is expensive but, if you do any amount of reference-checking, if you need information fast and if you consider the amount of graft that has gone into this piece, you'll not begrudge a penny of it. Jim will tell you quite happily, he has an army of satisfied customers!