NISO Elects New Chair, Vice Chair and Directors

Baltimore, MD -- The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) membership has elected new leadership for the 2008-2009 terms beginning on July 1, 2008. Oliver Pesch has been elected to serve as Chair of the NISO Board of Directors. Currently the Chief Strategist for EBSCO Information Services in Birmingham, Alabama, Pesch helps set direction for EBSCO's E-Resource Access and Management Services initiatives. Chuck Koscher has been elected to serve as Vice-Chair, and will become chair in 2009, when Pesch's term expires. As Director of Technology at CrossRef, Koscher has been actively involved in improving the linking infrastructure for scholarly publications. Both will serve on NISO's Board and Executive Committees.
"I am very excited about the opportunity to serve the community in leading NISO," said Pesch. "The Organization has made enormous strides over the past three years, transforming itself internally and externally and is poised to effect great change in the community."

The following industry leaders were also elected to seats on the NISO Board of Directors. They will join other currently serving Directors in managing and setting strategic direction for the organization.

  • Nancy Davenport, President, Nancy Davenport & Associates
  • Janice Fleming, Director of Business and Planning, PsycINFO, American Psychological Association
  • Bruce Heterick, Director, Library Relations, JSTOR
  • Barbara Preece, Executive Director, Boston Library Consortium
  • Bruce Rosenblum, CEO, INERA, Inc.
  • Mike Teets, Vice President, Global Engineering, OCLC

Other members of the NISO Board who will continue their terms through 2008-09 are:

  • James Neal, Vice President for IS & University Librarian, Columbia University
  • Winston Tabb, Dean of University Libraries, Johns Hopkins University
  • John Erickson, Principal Scientist, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
  • John Harwood, Professor, Pennsylvania State University
  • Michael Jensen, Director of Publishing Technologies, National Academies Press

"We are very pleased to have such a diverse and esteemed group of Directors joining the Board this year," said Todd Carpenter, Managing Director of NISO. "These industry leaders represent the diversity of our membershipfrom libraries, publishers and systems providersand we trust that they will deftly guide NISO in the coming year."

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 lifecycle of an information standard. NISO 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.

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