European Union (EU). This working group is part of a larger international collaboration between the NSF and the EU bringing together US and European scientists engaged in digital library research to plan common research agendas, share research results, and explore national, technical, and social expectations about digital libraries. It focuses on the problems of storage, accessibility, and presentation of information in any of the world’s languages. Meanwhile, other groups are addressing interoperability, metadata, intellectual property, and commerce mechanisms, as well as resource indexing and discovery in globally distributed digital libraries. 1 The multilingual working group includes researchers from information retrieval and natural language processing, two fields converging in the area of information access. The November meeting addressed two primary research areas: the problem of encoding, manipulating, and displaying information in any language and methods for querying, retrieving, and presenting that information. The resulting discussion emphasized user needs, identifying existing tools and resources, and research issues for short-, medium-, and long-term planning. For example, there is a growing need to access documents in many languages through retrieval systems that accept queries in the user’s native or preferred language. Furthermore, an accurate profile of the user’s linguistic capabilities would allow retrieved information to be presented without translation when possible but translated or summarized in another language when needed. A follow-up meeting in March in Zurich sought to identify the most important issues on the research agenda. The long-term goal is to assist the multilingual information access community in identifying research directions toward which future efforts should be concentrated. This summer, the working group plans to publish a white paper of its findings and recommendations. Since the group seeks to serve the larger digital library community, it invites comments and recommendations from researchers interested in these issues.