Groups in Europe and Japan have sponsored their own industry/academic Text retrieval Conferences (TRECs), strongly patterned after the TREC conference series developed and co-sponsored by the Information Access Division (IAD) in ITL and DARPA and using IAD software for evaluation. A European-funded consortium expanded the cross-language evaluation work that started in 1997 at NIST to more European languages, as well as involving additional European groups. IAD serves on the steering committee of this activity, called the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) and provides evaluation for the English language portion of the task. Additionally, the National Institute for Information in Japan sponsors a text retrieval conference called NTCIR that uses the task definitions and testing protocols established at NIST for cross-language retrieval in Japanese and Chinese (Korean to be added this year). IAD worked closely with the Japanese in terms of providing advice and software for the evaluation of participating industrial and academic systems. The website is http://trec.nist.gov.