BETHESDA, MD - November 27, 2006 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is pleased to announce the appointment of James G. Neal to the position of Vice-Chair of the NISO Board of Directors. Neal was elected by the Board of Directors to replace Robin Murray, who has stepped down from the position but will remain on the Board. At the same time, the Board appointed John T. Harwood at Pennsylvania State University and John S. Erickson at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories to fill open seats on the Board of Directors.
Jim Neal is Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University, having previously served as Dean of University Libraries at Indiana University and Johns Hopkins University. He has served as President of the Association of Research Libraries, on the Executive Board of the American Library Association, as Chair of the Board of the Research Libraries Group, and on the Board of the Freedom to Read Foundation, among numerous professional and leadership assignments. He is widely active in national and international forums in the areas of copyright and scholarly communication. He has served as a member of the NISO Board since 2004. Neal will assume the Chairmanship of NISO beginning June of 2007.
Dr. John S. Erickson has spent many years studying the unique social, legal, and technical problems that arise when managing and disseminating information in the digital environment. At Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, he has focused on the policy-based management of distributed, heterogeneous digital object repositories and content processing architectures. Prior to joining HP Labs in January 2000, he was the architect of Copyright Direct (tm), the first real-time, Internet-based service to fully automate the complex copyright permissions process for a variety of media types. Since 1998 Erickson has been awarded multiple US patents for rights management and information security technologies; numerous related patents are pending. He has been an active participant in a number of international metadata and rights management standardization efforts and currently serves on a number of industry advisory and standards committees.
John Harwood is Senior Director of Teaching & Learning with Technology, a unit of Information Technology Services at Penn State. He is Penn State's representative for the Committee on Institutional Cooperation's Learning Technologies Initiative. He serves on the Advisory Board for the IMS Global Learning Initiative, the National Center for Academic Transformation, and the Adobe Corporation.In addition to his administrative work at Penn State, Harwood holds a faculty appointment in the College of Information Sciences and Technology and the College of the Liberal Arts. His main research interests include 17th-century and 18th-century British literature; technologies for teaching and research in the humanities; information technology and its cultural implications; the history of science; and the history of rhetoric and technology.
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.