Multimedia information retrieval poses both technical and design challenges beyond those of established text retrieval. These issues extend both to the entry of search requests, system interation and the browsing of retrieved content, and the methodologies and techniques for content indexing. Prototype multimedia information retrieval systems are currently being developed which enable the exploration of both the user interaction and technical issues. The suitability of the solutions developed within these systems is currently being explored in the annual TRECVID evaluation workshops which enable researchers to test their indexing and retrieval algorithms and complete systems on common tasks and datasets.