GANDALF (General Alpha Numeric Direct Access Library Facility) is an information retrieval system designed and implemented at the University of New Mexico for the purposes of retrieving abstracts from large abstract data bases, such as the ERIC system. Previous batch-process information retrieval systems for use with the ERIC data base have been extremely slow, and thus expensive of computer time. Gandalf uses the user request to produce a list of addresses within the overall data base, so that only a small subset of the material is selected, and processing of unreferenced material is avoided. Furthermore, since GANDALF was designed to be used by persons with little or no computer experience, an attempt has been made to make the request statements as simple to use as possible. In comparisons runs, GANDALF was from ten to forty times as fast as QUERY (the currently available ERIC search system) in real time, and four to 77 times as fast in computer time. (Author/RH)