Reviews current systems designed to help end-users search online databases without the assistance of an intermediary and describes a prototype system which emulates the Deco (the text storage and retrieval system used by Unilever) interface on Dialog and Data-Star. Initial trials of the prototype system are reported. (15 references) (MES)

This paper describes a study that was undertaken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to compare the databases selected by 75 inexperienced student online searchers aided by an existing gateway system--INFOMASTER, a version of EASYNET--with databases selected manually by four experienced searchers who were reference librarians from…