BOOK REVIEWS INFOTRAP. Belmont, CA, Information Access Company, September 1985. Price varies with size of installation.Laser (videodisc) technology is in the forefront of the information I industry. A 12-inch videodisc has the potential to store the,equivalent of 5,000 floppy diskettes. This technology has already been adapted to the storage of bibliographic information by the Library of Congress, which stores the text of part of its collection on videodiscs in the interest of preservation. Private ventures in applying the technology include storing MARC records on laser disks; libraries involved in retrospective conversions may avoid the cost of searching records in online systems such as OCLC and RLIN by using these videodiscs. It was inevitable that laser technology would be used for indexing projects, due to its storage capacity and the fact that the retrieval process is virtually error-free.Infotrac'nl is the first application of this technology to legal indexing which has come to our attention. It became available in the summer of 1985 to libraries under a combination lease-to-purchase and user-fee agreement. As of August 1985, when the Case Western Reserve University Law Library received the system on a trial basis, a subscription included up to four IBM microcomputers and monitors, one videodisc player, one videodisc interface unit, four printers, cabling and security enclosures, and the program diskette (the software needed to search the videodisc). Subscribers also receive a new, updated and cumulated, videodisc each month, which is as simple to replace as putting a record on a turntable. It is this replaceable videodisc which stores the index entries.A user chooses between two databases in the Infotracm system:

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