The CLEF 2012 Conference on Information Access Evaluation meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visual Analytics was held at the “Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy, September 17–20, 2011. CLEF 2012 was organized by the Department of Computer, Control, and Management Enigneering “Antonio Ruberti”. Since 2000 the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) has played a leading role in stimulating research and innovation in a wide range of key areas in the domain of information retrieval. It has become a landmark in the annual research calendar of the international Information Retrieval and Search community. Through the years, CLEF has promoted the study and implementation of evaluation methodologies for diverse types of retrieval task and search scenario. As a result, a broad, strong and multidisciplinary research community has been created, which covers and spans the different areas of expertise needed to deal with the evaluation of solutions to challenging information tasks.