We provide an overview of the Garlic project, a new project at the IBM Almaden Research Center. The goal of this project is to develop a system and associated tools for the management of large quantities of heterogeneous multimedia information. Garlic permits traditional and multimedia data to be stored in a variety of existing data repositories, including databases, files, text managers, image managers, video servers and so on; the data is seen through a unified schema expressed in an object-oriented data model and can be queried and manipulated using an object-oriented dialect of SQL, perhaps through an advanced querybrowser tool that we are also developing. The Garlic architecture is designed to be extensible to new kinds of data repositories, and access efficiency is addressed via a "middleware" query processor that uses database query optimization techniques to exploit the native associative search capabilities of the underlying data repositories.