In information retrieval and text processing, the size of the available databases and text collections has grown enormously in the past few years, and users find it difficult to cope with the amount of text that is potentially of interest. As a result, there is growing interest in approaches capable of breaking down large texts into smaller constituent units, and in using short text passages for storage and retrieval purposes. Methods are described in this study for identifying important text passages in large texts, and suggestions are made for implementing useful text reading and text traversal strategies that provide selective text access in accordance with user needs. Some evaluation results for selective text access are appended.