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NISO Plus Awards Luncheon Recognizes Service to the Information Community

NISO Plus Awards Luncheon Recognizes Service to the Information Community

February 2026

The NISO Plus awards luncheon is an annual conference tradition, multiple awards were given in 2026 to recognize contributions to both NISO and the broader information community. This year the luncheon was hosted on two days, February 17–18, to allow more time for honoring awards recipients as well as the 2026 NISO Plus Scholarship cohort. 

The Ann Marie Cunningham Award, named in honor of the 1991–1994 Executive Director of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS), is given to volunteers who have gone above and beyond the call of duty in their work on behalf of NISO (NFAIS merged with NISO in 2019). This year the award went to Regina Reynolds, Director of the US ISSN Center at the Library of Congress. Reynolds’s career includes many years of volunteering with NISO, including working on standards committees like PIE-J, the Transfer Code of Practice, and the US National PID Strategy. She has also spoken at over two dozen NISO events. 

The NISO Fellows Award recognizes lifetime service, and in 2026 it went to Marshall Breeding, independent consultant and founder of the Library Technology Guides website. Breeding was-founder and co-chair of the NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) and a member of the NISO Patron Privacy project; he also authored a white paper on The Future of Library Resource Discovery and was a member of the Information Standards Quarterly editorial board. 

The main event of the awards luncheon is the Miles Conrad lecture, delivered by the recipient of the eponymous award. Miles Conrad was the founder of NFAIS, and the award recognizes lifetime achievements for the benefit of the information community. This year, the NISO Board of Directors named Alondra P. Nelson the 2026 recipient, and Nelson’s lecture, "Standards as Social Values," is now available on both the NISO website and the NISO video library. 

On Wednesday, NISO also recognized two of its 2026 NISO Scholarship awardees, Chiara del Vescovo, Senior Content Data Model Architect, Oxford University Press, and Brionna Johnson, E-Resources Metadata Librarian, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Del Vescovo and Johnson as well as the full scholarship cohort were chosen for their commitment to facilitating knowledge across cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional contexts.

We hope you’ll join us in congratulating this year’s awardees!