Robertson receives 2003 Special Humanities Award
Contact: Laura Hayes, PPO Program Officer
312-280-5055
For Immediate Release
June 13, 2003
Robertson receives 2003 Special Humanities Award
Deborah Robertson, director of the American Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office, has received the 2003 Special Humanities Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH).
Robertson is recognized by the board of the LEH for her impact on public awareness and appreciation of the humanities in Louisiana and nationwide.
Robertson’s leadership helped expand the LEH’s PRIME TIME Family Reading Time
® nationally to 32 states and the Virgin Islands.
PRIME TIME is a reading, discussion and storytelling series for families based on award-winning children’s books.
The program helps low-literacy, low-income parents and children bond together around the act of reading and learning together to improve skill and achievements.
Robertson is recognized for her leadership with PRIME TIME and several other national humanities programs for libraries.
The award was presented to Robertson at the LEH’s annual Humanities Award ceremony at the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, La., on April 16, 2003.
Robertson is founding director of the ALA Public Programs Office, a post she has held since 1990.
Prior to that Robertson worked in public relations and publishing at ALA.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Michigan and a master’s in library and information science from the University of Illinois.
In her community of Flossmoor, Ill., Robertson is a public library trustee and was co-chair of a successful library building referendum campaign in 2002.
The ALA, a nonprofit educational organization based in Chicago, was incorporated in 1876 and has 64,000 members.
The mission of the ALA Public Programs Office is to foster cultural programming as an integral part of library service in all types of libraries.
For more information about the ALA Public Programs Office, please visit
www.ala.org/publicprograms.
