The Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (formerly Cross-Language Evaluation Forum), or CLEF, is an organization promoting research in multilingual information access (currently focusing on European languages). Its specific functions are to maintain an underlying framework for testing information retrieval systems and to create repositories of data for researchers to use in developing comparable standards.The organization holds a conference every September in Europe since a first constituting workshop in 2000. From 1997 to 1999, TREC, the similar evaluation conference organised annually in the USA, included a track for the evaluation of Cross-Language IR for European languages. This track was coordinated jointly by NIST and by a group of European volunteers that grew over the years.