With the rapid growth of the global information society, the concept of library has evolved to embrace all kinds of information collections, on all kinds of storage media, and using many different access methods. The users of today's information networks and digital libraries, no longer restricted by geographic or spatial boundaries, want to be able to find, retrieve, and understand relevant information wherever and in whatever language it may have been stored. For this reason, much attention has been given over the past few years to the study and development of tools and technologies for multilingual information access (MLIA). This paper provides an overview of some of the issues that must be considered when building a system that provides access and retrieval functionality for document collections in multiple languages. The following topics are covered: (1) multilingual text processing, including language recognition, character encoding, language specific tokenization, and word normalization; (2) approaches to cross-language text retrieval, including machine translation, multilingual thesauri, using dictionaries, and corpus-based techniques; and (3) cross-language system evaluation campaigns, including the TREC (Text Retrieval Conference Series), CLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum, and NTCIR (NACSIS Test Collection for Information Retrieval). (Contains 17 references.) (MES)