The Science and Medicine Library holds over 7,000 periodical titles, provides access to locally mounted bibliographic databases, and serves about 15,000 students, faculty, and staff at the University of Toronto, and at 27 teaching hospitals in the city. The main, recurrent questions at information desks in the Library concern periodicals. In an effort to address this need in a new way, the Library decided to create a periodicals information center for selfhelp instruction, and to develop a tutorial in Hypercard on how to search for information in indexes and find periodicals in libraries. This paper deals with the background, nature and scope of the project, and its impact on users and on the library.