Feature image belongs to Rjommabolli
Too many memes? A Meme Librarian is your solution
In the past 20 years the Internet has totally revolutionised our society, our habits, and even our way of communicating. Many new professions were born with the digital revolution. And among all these new professions, there is a particular one which is not very famous, yet.
I am referring to the unusual profession of Amanda Brennan, a content and community associate at Tumblr, better known as the “meme librarian”. Yes, this woman catalogs memes in the same way as the old, moody lady behind the library desk catalogs books.
Basically, Amanda Brennan follows the entire “life” of a meme. From when it is used for the first time until when (after a bright, but short life) the meme loses its fame. She sifts through all the possible web contents from vines to new Tumblr blogs and finds what becomes viral in the internet community.
Amanda Brennan has a master’s in library science – the degree required to be a librarian. However, Amanda didn’t chose the same path of any of her peers. She has always been interested in blogging culture since she was a teen. Following which, Amanda took several metadata classes in graduate school and focused her studies on social media.
She started her career documenting online phenomenons at Know Your Meme and then she joined Tumblr, where she works today. While she was working at Know Your Meme though, Amanda was physically cataloguing every single blog that was appearing on the web scene. Now that she works for Tumblr, her job is mostly Tumblr-centric and focuses only on Tumblr blogs or general phenomenons born on the platform.
Thanks to Amanda Brennan’s work it is possible to find the very first creator of a certain meme, in the same way we’d hunt down the first manuscript of a famous author. Which matters, as Amanda explained, since finding the author of a meme helps to give him or her the recognition they deserve.
Of course, with the gigabytes of information, trends and phenomenons that flow daily out from the web, it’s only natural that someone like Amanda Brennan would arrive sooner or later.
