The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced James G. Neal as the 2020 Miles Conrad Lecturer. Neal will be presented with this prestigious award on February 24, 2020 at the NISO Plus Conference in Baltimore, MD.
Neal is the University Librarian Emeritus at Columbia University, serving as University Librarian between 2001 and 2014. He is a past president of the American Library Association (2017-2018). In 2019, he was appointed a Senior Policy Fellow at the American Library Association, with a focus on copyright and licensing, and working with the ALA Policy Corps. Neal also served as a member of the NISO Board of Directors and led NISO as Chair from 2006-2008.
The Miles Conrad Award was established in 1965 in commemoration of the organisational founder of the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFAIS). In support of American scientists working towards space exploration, the scholarly associations and government agencies that made up the NFAIS membership worked collaboratively to enhance the speed with which scientific knowledge could be disseminated, discovered, and acted upon. Over the course of sixty years, NFAIS has expanded its cross-disciplinary membership and played an important role in the development of online information services and resources. In 2019, NFAIS was folded into the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), continuing a tradition of advancing the infrastructure that enables the unfettered exchange of information among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities.
While at Columbia, Neal served as the Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian, providing leadership for university academic computing and a system of twenty-two libraries. His responsibilities included the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, the Copyright Advisory Office, and the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research. Previously, he served as the Dean of University Libraries at Indiana University and Johns Hopkins University, and held administrative positions in the libraries at Penn State University, University of Notre Dame, and the City University of New York.
In addition, James Neal has served on the university press boards at Columbia, Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University. He has represented the American library community in testimony on copyright matters before Congress, has served as an advisor to the U.S. delegation at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) diplomatic conference on copyright, and has worked extensively with copyright policy and advisory groups for universities and for professional and higher education associations. From 2005-2008, he was a member of the U.S. Copyright Office Section 108 Study Group.
Among his service contributions, Neal was chair of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) 2017 National Conference, and coordinated the fundraising for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) 2016 scholarship program.
Among his many awards, Neal was selected as the 1997 Academic Librarian of the Year by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), was the 2007 recipient of ALA’s Hugh Atkinson Memorial Award, and received the 2009 ALA Melvil Dewey Medal Award. He holds an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Alberta. He received the 2015 ALA Joseph W. Lippincott Award for "distinguished service to the profession of librarianship", as well as the Freedom to Read Foundation Roll of Honor Award.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
Click here to read the original press release.
