The Personal Adult Learning Lab, part of the Georgia Center for continuing Education, was established to (1) provide the type of learning environment that can support adult learners in their efforts to develop and direct their own learning projects and (2) enable researchers to learn more about the nature of self-directed learning as demonstrated by adult learners. During the first year of the Learning Lab's operation, three evenly divided groups of learners appeared to use its facilities and equipment--conferees, faculty/staff, and members of the local community. The conferees appeared most interested in materials about management skills, whereas local community members seemed most interested in computer training (especially for the IBM personal computer). The most pervasive first impression among those using the Learning Lab for the first time was that it would be a career counseling and testing service. Both conferees and community clients tended to spend most of their time with instructional materials delivered through computer-assisted instruction or a limited interactive video format. Seventy-seven percent of the conferees and 66 percent of the community clients indicated that the freedom to set one's own learning pace was the most valuable feature of the instruction offered at the center. The learning patterns observed among the users of the Learning Lab appear to confirm existing adult education research, which asserts that adult learning resources should reflect the documented interests and needs of the population being served and should offer learners the opportunity to control and shape their own learning efforts. (MN)