Large collections of full-text documents are now commonly used in automated information retrieval. When the stored document texts are long, the retrieval of complete documents may not be in the users' best interest. In such circumstances, efficient and effective retrieval results may be obtained by using passage retrieval strategies designed to retrieve text excerpts of varying size in response to statements of user interest. New approaches are described in this study for implementing selective passage retrieval systems, and identifying text passages responsive to particular user needs. An automated encyclopedia search system is used to evaluate the usefulness of the proposed methods.