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.

[2] CLEF 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of the conference and it was celebrated by publishing a book[3] on the lessons learned in 20 years of evaluation activities.

Before 2010,[4] CLEF was organised as a workshop co-located with the European Conference on Digital Libraries, consisting of a number of evaluation labs or tracks, similarly to TREC.

In 2012, INEX, a workshop on retrieval and access to structured text, previously organised annually at Schloß Dagstuhl, merged with CLEF to become one of its evaluation labs.

[8] In 2017, CLEF accommodated a number of tasks e.g. on identifying biological species from photographs or video clips, on stylistic analysis of authorship, and on health related information access.