The operational evaluation was carried out as an open field trial whereby the system was made freely available to a heterogeneous population of academic users to search for information in an ad-hoc way. The focus was on a single, probably one-off, search session and no explicit information on the characteristics of the test subjects, either as individuals or as groups, was gathered. The original intention was to recruit a more homogenous group of users who would access the system repeatedly to support a range of ongoing information seeking tasks or activities. In the event it was not possible to identify such a group within the institutional settings and the idea had to be abandoned. The findings of the project suggest that it would be valuable to undertake a more closed type of operational trial where the system's ability to support changing information needs in a richer and more varied information environment could be evaluated.