In this paper, we describe N-best 2008, the first Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition (LVCSR) benchmark evaluation held for the Dutch language. Both the accent as spoken in the Netherlands (Northern-Dutch) and in Belgium (Southern-Dutch or Flemish), will be evaluated. The evaluation tasks are broadcast news (BN) and conversational telephone speech (CTS). The N-best evaluation will take place in the spring of 2008 and is open to all research institutes and industries on voluntary basis. The goals of this first N-best evaluation is to define, set-up and conduct a Dutch LVCSR benchmark evaluation. In this paper, we will describe the state-of-the-art of Dutch LVCSR, recognition problems that are typical for the Dutch language, and the evaluation protocol.