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Members of the National Information
Standards Organization (NISO) have selected their board's leadership for the
2016-2017 term, which will begin on July 1, 2016. B. Tommie Usdin, President of
Mulberry Technologies, Inc., becomes Chair; and Chris Shillum, Vice President
Product Management, Platform and Data Integration at Reed Elsevier, has been
elected Vice Chair. Three other board members have also been confirmed: Gerry
Grenier (IEEE); Marian Hollingsworth (Thomson Reuters); and Evan Owens (Cenveo
Publisher Services).
Continuity is a welcome hallmark of this
election's result: Usdin, Shillum, Grenier, Hollingsworth, and Owens are all
continuing another term of service to NISO's board, continuity that helps the
organization smoothly advance its ongoing projects and goals. NISO Executive
Director Todd Carpenter welcomes the new board, commenting that, "Tommie,
Chris, and the whole board are deeply involved in work that impacts information
sharing technology and its users for decades to come. NISO is fortunate to have
our ideas and work guided by such a talented group."
Usdin and Shillum below describe their views of NISO's work and their goals for
the coming term; their professional biographies are also listed.
B. Tommie Usdin, Chair
I'm happy to help lead NISO in its
important work supporting the library, publisher, and information-interchange
communities, says Usdin. "My work on content markup has shown me how
important it is to users and consumers of information technology for standards
to get it right. Involvement in conferences and educational events, too, has
brought home that collaboration is essential, and collaboration among
developers and users of new resources is central to NISO's work. The stability
in NISO's current board facilitates continued teamwork; the tasks ahead are
challenging, but I foresee our working groups producing groundbreaking results
that are essential to our audience."
B. Tommie Usdin, President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy
specializing in XML systems for textual documents, has long been a leader in
the technology around content markup and the publishing production process. She
has organized a number of community efforts and conferences on the subject,
such as the Markup Technologies and Extreme Markup Languages events, and is
involved in the, Balisage conference series. She has served as an active member
of NISO's Board of Directors since 2013 and has been a member of the NISO
Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) and the NISO Standards Tag Set (STS) working
groups.
Chris Shillum, Vice Chair
"I am gratified to continue my leadership at NISO, an organization whose
ability to bring together stakeholders with different, and sometimes opposing,
goals makes it a vital part of scholarly infrastructure. I look forward to
working on upcoming projects on, for example, data privacy, that impact a
diverse set of users and that urgently need addressing." Shillum also
commented that, "as a veteran board member, I've seen how NISO has
achieved consensus on contentious issues in the past. Such problems are
interesting and vital to tackle, and many face us going forward. In addition,
standards and other documents issued by NISO are regularly reassessed, and the
coming years will see familiar standards getting a fresh look, a process in
which it's rewarding to participate."
Chris Shillum is Vice President Product Management, Platform and Data
Integration at Reed Elsevier, a position he has held since 2014. He has worked
for Elsevier since 1996, starting as Product Manager, Content, and then held
positions as Director, Product Development (1999-2001); Publishing Technology
Director (2001-2004); and Vice President Product Management, Platform and
Content (2004-2014). He has served a variety of community organizations
and served as a member of the NISO Board and as a member of the NISO Discovery
to Delivery Topic Committee.
Additional Board Members
Gerry Grenier is Senior Director, Publishing Technology at IEEE
Marian Hollingsworth is Director of Publisher Relations at Thomson Reuters
Evan Owens is Vice President, Publishing Technologies at Cenveo Publisher
Services
About NISO
NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, fosters the development and maintenance of
standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective
interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and
learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers,
information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning,
research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and
curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and
across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit
association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For
more information, visit the NISO
website.