This paper surveys the work carried out within two large consortia, AMI and IM2, on improving access to records of human meetings thanks to multimodal interfaces called meeting browsers. These tools help users navigate through multimedia records containing audio, video, documents and metadata, in order to obtain a general idea about what happened in a meeting or to find specific pieces of information. To explain the increasing importance of meeting browsers, the paper summarizes findings of user studies, discusses features of prototypes from AMI and IM2, and outlines a proposed evaluation protocol, providing reference scores for benchmarking. These achievements result from an iterative software process, alternating user studies, prototypes or products, and evaluation.