BISG Reveals Honorees for Two Industry Awards

Since 2013, the Book Industry Study Group has honored members of our community with an annual award, now called the Sally Dedecker Award for Lifetime Service, that recognizes the tireless and persistent efforts, often unseen, of an individual working on behalf of the book industry. Since 2014, we've also given an Industry Champion Award, which honors an individual whose efforts have advanced the publishing industry as a whole.

At the BISG Annual Meeting on April 22, we'll present these awards to two very deserving honorees. Joe Gonnella, an industry veteran whose career included roles at  Waldenbooks, Bantam Doubleday Dell, and more than 30 years at Barnes & Noble, will receive the Sally Dedecker Award for Lifetime Service. In his time at Barnes & Noble, Gonnella served on the BISG board for nearly two decades, including several years as its chair. His direction and support during that time proved critical in moving the industry forward on the adoption of the ISBN-13 identifier, work that was done in BISG committees and adopted by the book industry in 2007.

Pat Payton, currently Senior Manager, Provider Relations at ProQuest, part of Clarivate, will be honored with the Industry Champion Award. Pat's career includes service with Borders, Bowker, and now ProQuest. Her involvement with BISG started 15 years ago, and over that time she has led efforts to develop and maintain the BISG guide to metadata best practices, helped create BISG's educational product taxonomy, and worked with the Library of Congress to map ONIX metadata fields to their catalogue-in-publication (CIP) portal, among many contributions.

The awards will be presented as part of a lunchtime program at the annual meeting, which will take place at the Harvard Club of New York. Registration is now open, with options available for in-person and virtual attendance.