Welcome to the NINCH web site.

In addition to the original NINCH FORUMS, the annual membership meetings held December 2000 and December 2001, we have now included other meetings under this rubric. A Museums Meeting, held July 2002 provided a useful snapshot of the concerns of museum professionals in the digital realm. With Innodata, NINCH organized a symposium on costing models April 8, 2003, The Price of Digitization, which provoked great interest (report now available here and at the web site of the Canadian Heritage Information Network).

The First Edition of The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation & Management of Cultural Heritage Materials was published online November 2002. Described as "a resource that will become a touchstone for new practitioners for years to come," the NINCH Guide is designed for those in all sectors of the cultural community who are digitizing and networking cultural resources.

Comments and suggestions are strongly encouraged to assist us make the Guide responsive to the community it serves. Go directly to the NINCH Guide, make your comments, or see background on the Guide's production. A PDF version of the Guide (242 pages in length) is now also available.

Since 1997, NINCH has organized town meetings around the nation that educate the field in the basics of copyright law and the new issues arising from networking and using cultural materials online. The Copyright Town Meetings enable the community to explore new strategies for managing and using intellectual property. Reports are available on some individual meetings and on each annual series. Topics of the 2003 meetings have included Rights Issues for Digital Publishing (New York, February 26), Artists' Rights Issues (Cleveland, April 12), and Creating IP Policy in Museums (Portland, Oregon, May 22).

In 2003, NINCH is collaborating with OCLC and the Colorado Digitization Project in producing a series of day-long practical workshops on copyright issues for the cultural community in a digital age. The workshop is funded by IMLS. A key feature of the workshops is a modular Resource Set of materials that participants may use at work and to assist in organizing their own workshops. Speakers for the series (Lolly Gasaway, Georgia Harper, Maria Pallante-Hyun, Rachelle Browne, and Linda Tadic) cover the following topics: Copyright Basics in a Digital Age; Developing Institutional Policy; Intellectual Property Audits; Risk Management and Rights and Permissions. For further information see the OCLC web site for this series.