State and Regional Achievement Award winner named
Contact: Nanette Perez, OIF Project Coordinator
312-280-4223
For Immediate Release
June 13, 2003
State and Regional Achievement Award winner named
The Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC), Northampton, Mass., is the winner of the SIRS State and Regional Achievement Award presented by the American Library Association (ALA) Intellectual Freedom Round Table (IFRT).
The award funded by SIRS Mandarin, Inc., consists of a citation and $1,000. It recognizes innovative and effective intellectual freedom projects.
“This is such a wonderful honor for us,” said Library Director Nancy Talanian. “We are especially pleased to be strengthening our relationship with librarians who are staunch supporters of the First Amendment.”
BORDC is being honored for helping to lead a national, grassroots movement to protect civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. This project has been unusually successful in recruiting activists across the country to work at the local level in coalition-building and promoting awareness of the negative impact on intellectual freedom and civil liberties posed by the USA Patriot Act and other similar pieces of federal legislation and regulation. One measure of their success is the number of towns, cities and counties across the country that they have assisted in passing local resolutions that protect the Bill of Rights and support rolling back those portions of recently-passed federal legislation that infringe on civil liberties. At this time 94 communities and one state (Hawaii) have passed such resolutions.
June Pinnell-Stephens, member of IFRT’s SIRS State and Regional Intellectual Freedom Achievement Award Committee, will present the award to Talanian in June during the IFRT program at the ALA Annual Conference in Toronto.
More information on the award is available
online. or on the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, see
http://www.bordc.org.
