User:Redgen2/National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage

The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) was a nonprofit membership coalition of arts, humanities and social science organizations formed to create leadership from the cultural community in the evolution of the digital environment.

The Initiative began in 1993 as a collaborative project of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and the Getty Information Institute (GII), an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust. It hired its founding (and only) executive director in 1996 and was dissolved in 2003. CNI maintains the NINCH website as it was in 2003.

NINCH acted as a central clearinghouse for information about digital cultural projects, mostly through its NINCH-Announce listserv, as a technical and information resource for members, and as an advocate in policymaking circles.

Key projects included:
 * a copyright and intellectual property education program that included 23 Copyright Town Meetings (town-hall style forums with owners and users of copyrighted digital material educating and answering questions) - see the 2000 and 2001-02 Copyright Town Meeting Reports
 * a Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials
 * Computer Science and Humanities exploring how computer scientists could collaborate with humanities scholars in creating useful digital cultural resources (See the news release following the pioneering Building Blocks Workshop of 2000.

On closure NINCH had 109 member organizations (including 45 research libraries through the Association of Research Libraries).