When UC Davis art librarian Bonnie Holt needs to find an artist's rendering of a fish for a biologist, she draws a simple fish on her computer screen or, if she is looking for artwork with water as a visual component, she consults her "visual thesaurus" to begin a search. Within seconds, the computer retrieves a range of images from the UC Davis art slide database. Holt is testing a cutting-edge IBM query software toolset known as QBIC (query by image content) -- the first version of which IBM rolled out last month -- and she was the first "public" user. The software is unique, she says, because it combines identifying and sorting images by visual attributes such as color, shape and texture with traditional text database searches. Known as "Ultimedia Manager," the product itself consists of many mathematical measurements, calculations and other procedures that give mathematical values to a wide variety of visual attributes, say its designers at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose. Those values are stored in a database that can be searched for similar values calculated from the user's query. Holt gave a presentation about her QBIC project earlier this year at the Visual Resources Association's annual meeting, and her talk will be published in a forthcoming association journal.