This paper will present a critical analysis of our attempts to build Virtual Research Environments (VREs) for everyday Humanities research tasks using digital archives. Numerous specialised VREs have been developed for addressing particular tasks in various humanities disciplines. The Silchester VREs addressed data integration in archaeological excavations, the SDM VRE developed services for sharing and annotating manuscripts, while TEXTvre is concerned with TEI-based resource creation. Building on these experiences, gMan addressed the issue of moving beyond support for specific, focused tasks, and instead building services to enable more general-purpose humanities research activities, such as integrating and organising the heterogeneous and often unstructured digital resources, and support for ‘active reading’ processes Brockman et al. 2001 scholarly work in the humanities and the evolving information environment.