Dr. Marianna Tax Choldin (1942-2023) was the inaugural Mortenson Distinguished Professor and founding director of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign where she served from 1991-2003.
She was a fierce defender of freedom of information. She brought nearly 600 librarians from around the world to the Mortenson Center during her 11-year leadership of the unit, and lectured extensively in the Soviet Union on censorship and information-access issues.
During her more than 30 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Choldin served as an adjunct professor in the iSchool and headed both the Russian and East European Center and the Slavic and East European Library.
From 1997 to 2000 she chaired the library program of the Soros Foundation. From 2004 through 2010 she was founding president of the Rudomino Library Council USA, an organization supporting projects that promoted tolerance in Russia.
Selected Awards:
*2011:Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
*2011: Alumni Medal form the UChicago Alumni Association
*2005: John Ames Humphry/OCLC/Forest Press Award-the American Library Association International Relations Committee, for significant contributions to international librarianship
*2000: Medal of Pushkin from the Russian Federation for "extraordinary contributions in the sphere of Russian culture and education."
Selected Publications:
Choldin, Marianna Tax. 2016. Garden of Broken Statues : Exploring Censorship in Russia. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press.
Choldin, Marianna Tax, Maurice Friedberg, and Barbara L. Dash. 1989. The Red Pencil : Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Choldin, Mariana Tax. 1985. A Fence around the Empire : Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under the Tsars. Duke University Press.
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Kathleen de la Peña McCook
Distinguished University Professor
School of Information
University of South Florida
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