Currently, research infrastructures are being designed and established in many disciplines since they all suffer from an enormous fragmentation of their resources and tools. In the domain of language resources and tools the CLARIN initiative has been funded since 2008 to overcome many of the integration and interoperability hurdles. CLARIN can build on knowledge and work from many projects that were carried out during the last years and wants to build stable and robust services that can be used by researchers. Here service centres will play an important role that have the potential of being persistent and that adhere to criteria as they have been established by CLARIN. In the last year of the so-called preparatory phase these centres are currently developing four use cases that can demonstrate how the various pillars CLARIN has been working on can be integrated. All four use cases fulfil the criteria of being cross-national.

The paper provides a general introduction to the CLARIN project, a large-scale European research infrastructure project designed to establish an integrated and interoperable infrastructure of language resources and technologies. The goal is to make language resources and technology much more accessible to all researchers working with language material, particularly non-expert users in the Humanities and Social Sciences. CLARIN intends to build a virtual, distributed infrastructure consisting of a federation of trusted digital archives and repositories where language resources and tools are accessible through web services. The CLARIN project consists of 32 partners from 22 countries and is currently engaged in the preparatory phase of developing the infrastructure. The paper describes the objectives of the project in terms of its technical, legal, linguistic and user dimensions.