Information retrieval systems offer two main methods to access information: searching by submitting a query and browsing a constructed navigation hierarchy. In most systems, these two methods are accessed and operated by the information seeker in different ways and generate different types of result sets that allow different kinds of operations to be performed upon them. This paper suggests two general principles and a set of techniques implementing them for combining the browsing and searching access methods and interfaces for a system into a unified information navigation access method. It illustrates some of these techniques with implementations in the MEERCAT multimedia information management system. 17 Pages