Description This Coordination Action supported the development and consolidation of expertise in the research area of multilingual information access and has disseminated this knowhow to application communitiesThe popularity of Internet and the consequent global availability of networked information sources and digital libraries have led to a strong demand for multilingual access and communication technologies. These technologies should support the timely and cost-effective provision of knowledge-intensive services for all members of linguistically and culturally diverse communities. This is particularly true in the multilingual setting of Europe. Despite recent research advances, there are still very few operational systems available, and these are limited to the most widely used languages. The Treble-CLEF project was launched to tackle the challenge how to best transfer the research results to a wider market place.The core activity in the project has been to promote research, development, implementation and industrial take-up of multilingual and multimodal information access functionality. This has been achieved in the following ways:by continuing to support the annual system evaluation campaigns of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) with tracks and tasks designed to stimulate R&D that meets the requirements of the user and application communities;by constituting a scientific forum for the Multilingual Information Access (MILA) community of researchers, enabling them to meet and discuss results, emerging trends, and new directions;by acting as a virtual centre of competence providing a central reference point for anyone interested in studying or implementing MLIA functionality and encouraging the dissemination of information.Project resultsThe support of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) has been a primary objective of the project and has involved the organisation of the CLEF 2008 and 2009 evaluation campaigns, in-depth analysis of their results, and the creation of a number of valuable reusable test collections for benchmarking purposes.TrebleCLEF has released three Best Practices White Papers with the aim of providing practical information for systems designers and developers: (a) Best Practices for Language Resources for MLIA; (b) Best Practices for System-oriented and User-oriented MLIA; (c) Best Practices for Test Collection Creation, Evaluation Methodologies and Language Processing Technologies.