The central funding for this service was terminated on 1 April 2008. However, King’s set up the CeRch, which incorporates the former AHDS Executive staff, thus keeping the expertise together in one place. The Centre was set up to face in two directions: on the one hand it was responsible for producing a research infrastructure for King’s (the Virtual Research Environment, or VRE) as part of the wider Connected Campus programme. This exploited the Centre’s areas of expertise in repositories and data management, and built on prior plans for enhancing AHDS’s infrastructure, which were not ultimately implemented due to the closure of the service. On the other hand, the Centre aims to be a self-funding R&D unit, attracting funding from JISC and the research councils such as the EPSRC. The VRE infrastructure project will be a three- year (2008–2010) project that will support and streamline both research practice – that is, what researchers actually do when they carry out their research – and the necessary research-support processes such as obtaining funding, managing grants, and planning research projects. It aims to be an extensible infrastructure into which services, tools and resources can be plugged, operating within a managed framework