Why You Should Join NINCH NINCH is a unique, diverse coalition of educational and cultural organizations, created to assure leadership from the cultural community in the evolution of the digital environment and to help shape it through intensive, collaborative discussion and thoughtful action of its constituent members. See our Mission and Core Values Statements. NINCH is unique in building a framework within which museums, universities, scholarly societies, libraries, archives and arts organizations can work together to network cultural resources in an integrated and meaningful way. NINCH provides an essential service to the members of the educational and cultural community, readily networking information critical to their changing roles in a rapidly digitizing environment. The benefits of joining NINCH are those of joining a platform where key work is being done to construct a rich "exploratorium" of knowledge and discovery for cultural materials that avoids the pitfalls that would produce a pale and fragmented digital world where works can not be usefully connected or related to other materials, cannot be authenticated or disappear without trace. NINCH offers: a FORUM for discussion and sharing across all the sectors, seen in: membership roster; Copyright Town Meetings; Forum for members; Annual Review of Best Examples of achievements across all sectors; our NINCH-ANNOUNCE listserv; and our sector-by-sector meetings (see the Museums Meeting of July 2002). a PLATFORM for creating tools, policies, guides, etc., applicable across all sectors. See, for example: NINCH Working Groups The NINCH Guide to Good Practice The Database of Humanities Computing projects an opportunity to create NEW ENVIRONMENTS. See, for example our work on: New Economic Models (Conference with CLIR) Computer Science and Humanities initiative NINCH is a new kind of organization enabling people across our several communities to identify common issues and to work together to “develop new visions for the arts and humanities.” Those connected through NINCH (working group members or simply readers of our NINCH-Announce listserv) now know far more about each other’s concerns and ways of working than when we began. The richness, complexity and range of issues embraced by NINCH clearly suggest we have many years of work ahead: please join us as we build on our successes. For further information, or to have your questions answered contact: David Green david@ninch.org 202.296.5346