As its contribution to the 500th Anniversary of The Encounter of Two Worlds, Millersville University of Pennsylvania created and installed The Computerized Information Retrieval System (CIRS) on Columbus and the Age of Discovery in 1989. A joint research project of the History Department and Academic Computing Services, CIRS is a text retrieval system containing over 1100 text articles from magazines, journals, newspapers, speeches, official calendars and other sources relating to various encounter themes. [self-description]