She Is a Meme Librarian
January 20, 2016
Memes are random bits of Internet culture that come and go faster than the highest DSL speed. There are so many memes out there that it seems impossible to catalog the trends, much less each one. The Independent tells us that Amanda Brennan has made a career out of studying and documenting memes, becoming the world’s first meme librarian: “Meet Tumblr’s ‘Meme Librarian,’ The Woman With The Best Job On The Internet.”
Brennan works at Tumblr and her official title is content and community manager, but she prefers the title “meme librarian.” She earned a Master’s in Information from Rutgers and during graduate school she documented memes for Know Your Meme, followed by Tumblr.
“[In graduate school] immediately I knew I did not want to work in a traditional library. Which is weird because people go to library school and they’re like ‘I want to change the world with books!’ And I was like ‘I want to change the world of information.’ And they started a social media specialization in the library school, and I was like, ‘This is it. This is the right time for me to be here.’”
Brennan is like many librarians, obsessed with taxonomy and connections between information. The Internet gave her an outlet to explore and study to her heart’s content, but she was particularly drawn to memes, their origins, and how they traveled around the Internet. After sending an email to Know Your Meme about an internship, her career as a meme librarian was sealed. She tracks meme trends and discovers how they evolve not only in social media, but how the rest of the Internet swallows them up.
I wonder if this will be a future focus of library science in the future?
Whitney Grace, January 20, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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