Prepared for users of OCLC terminals at the Michigan State University library, this manual provides a brief description of the contents of the OCLC database, instructions for constructing search requests in OCLC, guidelines for interpreting OCLC search results, a key to "reading" the OCLC screen, an overview of typical terminal responses and what to do about them, instructions for qualifying searches by type of publication and by publication date, an overview of title word peculiarities and personal name peculiarities in the OCLC system, a list of stopwords for the OCLC database, a glossary of terms employed in the manual, and an index. Search request parameters are described for book titles, periodical titles, author/title combinations, personal authors, and corporate authors. An illustration of the OCLC display screen and keyboard is included. (JL)