What Happened in CLEF \(\ldots \) For Another While?

2024 marks the 25 \(^\text {th}\) birthday for CLEF, an evaluation campaign activity which has applied the Cranfield evaluation paradigm to the testing of multilingual and multimodal information access systems in Europe. This paper provides a summary of the motivations which led to the establishment of CLEF, a description of how it has evolved over the years, and its major achievements.