NISO Programs Get Major Boost from Mellon Foundation

Grant Will Help Transform Information Standards-Development Process

BALTIMORE, MD - June 18, 2007 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has received a $196,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation under its Scholarly Communications Program. The award will be used to transform and invigorate the standards process by supporting the adoptionof technology tools for collaboration and the incubation of new community initiatives via a series of Thought Leader meetings.

"The NISO Board is delighted with this news," said Board Chair Carl Grant. "These funds will enable NISO to start work immediately on two important initiatives - getting NISO committees to work more efficiently and strategically and pro-actively fostering new standards activities. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its generous support of the community engaged in scholarly information exchange."

"This new grant will enable NISO to provide a suite of coordination tools that will allow groups to form, address an issue, and release their standards solution for implementation rapidly and broadly," noted Todd Carpenter, NISO's Managing Director. "It will also provide a forum for the development of new standardized approaches and innovative solutions to pain points in the acquisition, management, dissemination and curation of scholarship."

In 2005, The Mellon Foundation supported a Blue Ribbon Panel as part of NISO’s
strategic planning effort. The Panel articulated the need for the model of
community involvement and standards development that the latest grant supports.

Carpenter continued, “As the Blue Ribbon Panel indicated, our field needs standards, suggested guidelines and other new tools that can keep up with the speed of change in technology. We now have a roadmap and funding to solve that problem.

About the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)

NISO 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 life cycle of an information standard. NISO (www.niso.org) is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). More information about NISO is available on its website: www.niso.org.