HEADLINE: Future Environments

NINCH charts and assists in shaping the economic and technical environments the community will need in the future.

IP Action Agenda
Based on the experience gained from its Copyright Town Meetings, NINCH is preparing an agenda of non-legislative items that need community action. These include rights and permissions, licensing and other distribution models, copyright management and education, the public domain and international issues. Agenda preparation starts with a two-day conference planned for the Fall of 2002.

New Economic Models
Following on from a successful conference jointly organized with the Council on Library and Information Resources, and held in February 2001, NINCH will continue this collaborative exploration and encouragement of new economic models being developed by libraries, museums and others building digital collections. For a report on the conference, "Building and Sustaining Digital Collections: Models for Libraries and Museums," see the CLIR website.

Computer Science & the Humanities
NINCH and key partners work with practitioners both in computer and information science and technology and the humanities to foster convergence in the research agendas of these disciplines. The goal is the design and development of new scholarly tools and more robust digital environments. This initiative has included a 1997 Computing & the Humanities Roundtable (National Academy of Sciences), a 2000 "Building Blocks Workshop" for humanists to define disciplinary needs, and a series of Computing & Humanities conferences, to be initiated in 2002.