The Internet activist Aaron Swartz will be awarded the American Library Association’s James Madison Award on Friday as part of the group’s Freedom of Information Day event at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Swartz, who committed suicide in January in the midst of a federal prosecution for document theft, will be honored for his efforts to promote open access to research and government information, according to the group’s president, Maureen Sullivan.
“Aaron had a deep commitment in all his work to support open access, which is a core value of libraries and so many people who use them,†Ms. Sullivan said, adding: “At times, it was beyond a passion.â€
As a teenager, Mr. Swartz designed code for the Creative Commons licensing system, helped to develop the RSS Web feed tchnology, and helped found the social news Web site Reddit. In 2008, he created a computer program that enabled free access to federal judicial documents. He is also the founder of Demand Progress, a group that promotes online social justice campaigns.
In 2011, Mr. Swartz was arrested and accused of hacking into the MIT computer system and stealing more than 4 million documents from JSTOR, a database of scientific and scholarly articles. Mr. Swartz was eventually charged with 13 felonies faced up to $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison, a penalty that many activists and others denounced overly harsh and that Mr. Swartz’s family maintained caused his suicide.
The award ! to Mr. Swartz will be formally presented by U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat and a sponsor of “Aaron’s Law,†a bill introduced shortly after Mr. Swartz’s death that would revise federal computer fraud law to prevent similar prosecutions.
Ms. Lofgren, whose district includes Silicon Valley, herself received the award last year, in recognition of her co-sponsorship of the Federal Research Public Access Act and her efforts against the Stop Online Piracy Act, whic Mr. Swartz also campaigned against. The Stop Online Piracy Act was withdrawn last year.
