Experiments are described designed to retrieve individual paragraphs of textbook material in answer to user-submitted queries. The retrieval strategies are based on the global comparison of paragraph texts, as well as on the local processing of text sentences. Furthermore, the retrieved items may be freely chosen, or may alternatively be restricted to certain areas in a clustered arrangement of book paragraphs. The retrieval results indicate that high retrieval values are obtainable for the more refined retrieval strategies, ranging between 0.70 and 0.80 in search precision.