The NINCH Guide to Good Practice
in the Digital Representation and Management
of Cultural Heritage Materials

The NINCH Guide to Good Practice
in the Digital Representation and Management
of Cultural Heritage Materials

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Early developers of digital resources often had little thought for how their projects might dovetail with others. Today many of these projects suffer from this lack of forethought; they cannot be extended for broader use, they cannot be built upon by others and the chances are slim that they will survive into the future. More recently, the cultural community has begun to realize the importance of applying technical and information standards intelligently and consistently. The use of such standards not only adds longevity and scalability to the project’s life cycle, but also enables an ever widening public to discover and use its digital resources. One of the goals of this Guide to Good Practice is to show the critical importance for the community of moving beyond the narrow vision of these early project-based enthusiasts and thinking through what is needed to establish sustainable programs. By adopting community shared good practice, project designers can ensure the broadest use of their materials, today and in the future, by audiences they may not even have imagined and by future applications that will dynamically recombine ‘digital objects’ into new resources. They can ensure the quality, consistency and reliability of a project’s digital resources and make them compatible with resources from other projects and domains, building on the work of others. Such projects can be produced economically and can be maintained and managed into the future with maximum benefit for all. In short, good practice can be measured by any one project’s ability to maximize a resource’s intended usefulness while minimizing the cost of its subsequent management and use. Within the cultural and educational communities, there are today many different types of guides to good practice written for particular disciplines, institution types or specific standards. These include the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, Cornell University Library’s Digital Imaging
for Libraries and Archives, the Digital Library Federation’s Guides to Quality in Visual Resource Imaging, the Getty Trust’s Introduction to Vocabularies and Introduction to Metadata and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Data Service series of discipline-based “Guides to Good Practice.” In creating the National Digital Library, the Library of Congress has been assiduous in providing documentation and discussion of its practices; similarly, the National Archives has published its internal “Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access,” and the Colorado Digitization Project has brought together in a web portal a wide-ranging collection of administrative, technical, copyright and funding resources"

By the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), University of Glasgow,
and the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH)

NINCH

October 2002

Webb, Kimberly

Copyright 2002, National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage

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