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The 2024 Ann Marie Cunningham Award Recipients Are...

The 2024 Ann Marie Cunningham Award Recipients Are...

February 2024

Information Industry News

Our Deserving Honorees

The Ann Marie Cunningham Service Award was established in memory of Ann Marie Cunningham, who served as NFAIS Executive Director from 1991 to 1994. Our 2024 recipients — individuals who have made outstanding contributions to standards development — are Jeffrey Beck, National Library of Medicine, and B. Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies. Beck and Usdin played critical roles in the development of the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), the technical standard released in 2011 and now in use by scholarly publishers around the world, and they continue to lead the JATS standing committee. 

Ms. Usdin has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception, and with SGML since 1985. Tommie chairs Balisage: The Markup Conference and is a frequent speaker at JATS-Con, the Journal Article Tag Suite Conference. She has led teams doing document analysis and DTD/schema development for medical reference works, scientific and technical textbooks, industrial manuals, legal treatises, and historical literature. She was lead designer of the National Library of Medicine's Journal Publishing Tag Set (the predecessor to JATS) of JATS as it has evolved, and of BITS, the Book Interchange Tag Suite. 

Jeff Beck is a Technical information Specialist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. He has been involved in the PubMed Central project since it began in 2000. He has been working in print and then electronic journal publishing since the early 1990s. Currently he is co-chair of the NISO Z39.96 JATS Standing Committee and is a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences.

NISO is grateful to these fantastic contributors and their on-going contributions to the development of standards.