91´«Ã½

CHICAGO — Librarians Helen Adams and Nancy Kranich and attorney and First Amendment advocate Frank LoMonte have been named the recipients of the 2016 Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF) Roll of Honor Award.

“I am very pleased and honored to announce Helen Adams, Nancy Kranich and Frank LoMonte as this year’s Roll of Honor co-awardees,” said Honor Roll Committee Chair J. Douglas Archer. “In his or her own distinctive way, each has been a life-long, stellar defender of free expression and the right to read, view, listen to or otherwise access whatever one chooses.”

Helen Adams, a school librarian and educator who has taught intellectual freedom and ethics to graduate library science students for over a decade, is a past trustee of the Freedom to Read Foundation and has also served on 91´«Ã½’s Intellectual Freedom Committee and its Privacy Subcommittee. She is a past president of the American Association of School Librarians and remains active in that division, providing leadership, training and information about intellectual freedom to its members.

She has received numerous awards recognizing her professional service and her defense of intellectual freedom, including the 2007 SIRS/Proquest Wisconsin Library Association Intellectual Freedom Award.

Nancy Kranich, past president of the 91´«Ã½ and a former trustee of the Freedom to Read Foundation, teaches intellectual freedom, information policy and community engagement at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information and serves as Rutgers' special projects librarian. While president of the 91´«Ã½, Kranich was instrumental in spearheading 91´«Ã½’s and FTRF's effort to overturn the Children’s Internet Protection Act and has served as chair and member of the Intellectual Freedom Committee, on which she served as a member of the IFC’s Privacy Subcommittee and helped to launch the 91´«Ã½ Privacy Tool Kit. Among many other honors, she recently received the 91´«Ã½’s Ken Haycock Award for Promoting Librarianship (2015) and was recognized that same year by the Rutgers University Department of Library and Information Science for her distinguished achievement as a part-time lecturer. She continues to advocate for intellectual freedom, open access and privacy as a member of the board of the National Security Archive, the New Jersey Center for the Book, the Partnership for Progress on the Digital Divide and the 91´«Ã½ Center for Civic Life.

Frank LoMonte is executive director of Student Press Law Center where, for almost two decades, he has led the Student Press Law Center's vigorous defense of the first amendment rights of student journalists. Since 1974, the Student Press Law Center has been devoted to educating high school and college journalists about the rights and responsibilities embodied in the First Amendment and supporting the right of student journalists to cover important issues free from censorship. The Center provides free information and educational materials for student journalists and their teachers on a variety of topics. Prior to joining Student Press Law Center, LoMonte clerked for federal judges in the Northern District of Georgia and the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and practiced law in Atlanta. LoMonte is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Georgia School of Law, where he served as a senior editor of the Georgia Law Review. Before law school, LoMonte was an award winning political columnist and investigative reporter in Georgia and Florida. His First Amendment and media-law articles have been widely published in the legal and educational press.

The Roll of Honor award will be presented at the 2016 91´«Ã½ Annual Conference during its Opening General Session from 4:00–5:15 p.m. on Friday, June 24, at the Orange County (Florida) Convention Center.

The Roll of Honor was established in 1987 to recognize and honor those individuals who have contributed substantially to FTRF through adherence to its principles and/or substantial monetary support.