This paper introduces the IPAL participation at CLEF 2008 on the new TEL collec- tion and on the ad-hoc photographic retrieval ImageClef. Following the changes in evaluation criterion this year in ImageClef, i.e. promoting diversity in the top ranked images, we have integrated the novelty measure in our similarity based system devel- oped in ImageCLEF 2007. The novelty score is calculated between an image in the ranked list and the images ranked higher than it. The system is still an automatic and mixed-modality based image search, which is similar to the previous years. 10 runs are submitted this year in ImageClef. In the overall ranking, our group stands at the 3rd place in 25 participants. 4 runs are submitted for the TEL collection. In this working note, we will share our experience in participating these two tasks.