Down memory lane.

Six or so years ago we took a look at the university of Washington's Cities/Buildings Database at www.washington.edu/ark2. Begun in 1995 it changed its search system straight after we reviewed it.

This column is the scarred veteran of a thousand search engine systems and none has yet come up with the ability to produce that um, small building, mostly black riling, somewhere in Europe some time in the 70s ... Actually I hear that a search engine based on your sketch of what you remember an object looked like is being developed--with obvious extensions to architectural searches. Still the time honoured tests of Ictinus and Callicrates came up trumps with five views of the Parthenon. Two things good about this, apart from getting the search right by entering just the names, were that there was no need to capitalize the name and that 'kallicrates' an alternative spelling much deprecated in this country produced a decisive 'No matches found'.

Strictly speaking a really efficient search engine would cope with Callicrates and Kallicrates. The other thing good about the search engine is the very wide set of criteria you can use. Ostensibly there is 'Title', 'Architect/Builder', 'Nation' and 'Across All Fields' but when you click on the tick adjacent to any of these another 20 or so related headings drops down. The only down-side is that this is a small database with only 5000 images--the average small architecture school slide library probably has as many--but probably not digitized nor quite so accessible.