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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.

Unique in several ways, the NINCH Guide is community-based (created by practitioners in many disciplines and media from museums, libraries, archives, the arts and academic departments); it is principles-based (directed by core principles in networking cultural resources); and it is empirical (partly derived from interviews at distinguished digitization programs in the U.S. and abroad, conducted by Glasgow University's Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute).

The Guide creates a high-level pathway through the issues and decisions to be made in networking heritage materials, following the life-cycle of digital projects in its thirteen sections. It includes a bibliography, an edited set of interview reports, and the extensive interview instrument.

Comments and suggestions are strongly encouraged to assist us make the Guide responsive to the community it serves. Go to the NINCH Guide directly, 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.

We thank New York University for mounting the First Edition of the NINCH Guide on its web site and OCLC for mirroring the Guide here and abroad. The NINCH Guide has been made possible through a grant from the Getty Grant Program of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

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 individual meetings and on each annual series. 2003 meetings scheduled include a meeting on Rights Issues of 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.

The first of these workshops took place at the IMLS WebWise conference, February 26, 2003, Future meetings will take place at the conferences of the American Library Association (Toronto, June 20), the Society of American Archivists (Los Angeles, August 20) and the American Association for State and Local History (Providence, September 17). Speakers for the series (Lolly Gasaway, Georgia Harper, Maria Pallante, 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.