The ultimate goal of CLARIN is the construction and operation of a shared distributed infrastructure that aims at making language resources and technology available to the humanities and social sciences research communities at large. The preparatory phase will pave the way for implementation along 4 dimensions: Funding and governance: The aim is to bring together the funding agencies and to work out a ready-to-sign draft agreement between the funding agencies in the participating countries about governance, financing, construction and operation of the infrastructure. Technical: The technical objective is to provide a detailed specification of the infrastructure, agreement on data and interoperability standards to be adopted, and a running, validated prototype based on these specifications. The validation should cover technical, linguistic and user aspects. Language: For the validation the prototype will be populated with a selection of language resources and technologies for all participating languages. The objective is to deliver a sufficiently populated, and thoroughly tested prototype that demonstrates the adequacy of the approach for all participating languages. User: In order to fully exploit the potential of what language resources and technology have to offer to the humanities and social sciences communities we will: (i) make an analysis of current practice in the use of language technology in the humanities in order to establish the needs; (ii) launch and monitor typical humanities projects in order to validate the prototype and its specifications; (iii) create awareness in the humanities and social sciences communities of the potential of the use of language resources and technology to improve or innovate their research; (iv) bring together the humanities and language technology communities in order to ensure lasting synergies.