Made some progress today:

• Reorganized images and XML on the server, and wrote rsync scripts to bring down changes from there to my machine so it's easy to keep up to date with PAB's changes. Also wrote script to update my local copy of the Cocoon project from my working directory.
• Added a collection.xconf file specifying some index parameters for the db.
• Wrote the search.xq file, and confirmed that it can return results from searches as XML. I still need to add an override so that it only includes the full TEI wrapper document when there's no actual search (or do I? right now, it can handle a search done through GET without AJAX, which might be a good idea).
• Began working on the thumbnail-scrolling banner for the search results. I have it showing what I want -- the images show up from the search results -- but now I have to make it scroll. There's a really nice scrolling component made with JQuery here; I think I'll take that idea, unpack it from its JQuery, and implement it in native code. I really want to avoid JQuery if I can.