Objectives: We present the summarization system in the PERSIVAL medical digital library. Although we discuss the context of our summarization research within the PERSIVAL platform, the primary focus of this article is on strategies to define and generate customized summaries.

Multi-document summarisation is the process of producing a single summary of a collection of related documents. Much of the current work on multi-document text summarisation is concerned with the English language; relevant resources are numer-ous and readily available. These resources include human generated (gold-standard) and automatic summaries. Arabic multi-document summarisation is still in its infancy. One of the obstacles to progress is the limited availability of Arabic resources to support this research. When we started our research there were no publicly available Arabic multi-document gold-standard summaries, which are needed to automatically evaluate system generated summaries. The Document Understanding Conference (DUC) and Text Analysis Conference (TAC) at that time provided resources such as gold-standard extractive and abstractive summaries (both human and system generated) that were only available in English. Our aim was to push forward the state-of-the-art in Ara-bic multi-document summarisation. This required advancements in at least two areas. The first area was the creation of Arabic test collections. The second area was con-