NISO Members Elect New Leadership for 2016-2017 Term

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 voted 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 year 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 deep in work that will affect information 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 a new conference series, Balisage: The Markup Conference. 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) working group. 

Chris Shillum, Vice Chair

Shillum remarks that, "I am happy to continue serving in a leadership role at NISO, an organization whose ability to bring together stakeholders with different, and sometimes divergent, 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 complex issues in the past. Such problems are interesting and vital to tackle, and many face us going forward. NISO Standards and Recommended Practices are in use every day across our community and act as the glue that helps systems interoperate and support competition and choice of tools and services."

Chris Shillum is currently Vice President of Platform and Data Integration for Elsevier, where he is focusing on integrating data resources across silos and building big data capabilities. He has worked in various capacities on Elsevier's online products, including ScienceDirect since its inception in 1997. Chris, who joined NISO's board in 2014, holds a Masters in Electronic Systems Engineering from the University of York in the UK.

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.