Hi Michael,
We've been working on planning a center here at Emory, too. It's a big job, with lots of questions, but these are the "big-idea" resources I found most helpful. Unfortunately, they're pretty U.S.-centric, but perhaps you can find some ideas that are useful to you. By far the most productive thing we've done, though, is talk to people at some of the centers we respect. I really recommend doing that if you can.
Council on Library and Information Resources, Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship (Washington, D.C., March 2009), http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub145/pub145.pdf
Richard Edwards, “Creating the CDRH,” University of Nebraska-Lincoln, July 18, 2005, http://cdrh.unl.edu/articles/creatingcdrh.php.
Kevin Guthrie, Rebecca Griffiths, and Nancy Maron, Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources: An Ithaka Report (Ithaka S+R, May 2008), http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategy/sca_ithaka_sustainability_report-final.pdf
“Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences" (2006), http://www.acls.org/programs/Default.aspx?id=644.
Diane M. Zorich, A Survey of Digital Cultural Heritage Initiatives and Their Sustainability Concerns (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, June 2003), http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub118/contents.html
Diane M. Zorich, A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, November 2008), http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub143abst.html.
There's also a very good bibliography over at Sustaining Digital History.
