This paper outlines the research, development, and implementation plans for the Cheshire system as part of an overall digital library framework. Our plans are based on developing a high-level component framework extensible and flexible enough to accommodate radically different architectural models; one which supports large-scale preservation environments characteristic of content management systems such as DSpace and Fedora; and the support for semantic retrieval and natural language processes involving large-scale distributed datasets, served in a highly parallel environment. Rather than prototyping a single solution, we intend to follow a modular approach with a variety of text and data mining, ontological, document rendering, and text retrieval tools which can be used in various combinations according to need, in essence, the Cheshire digital library framework is designed to address the twin aspects of access and preservation in new and sustainable ways.