I admit it. I wish I had this job. Tumblr’s Meme Librarian is an actual thing and the librarian in charge of memes has the best job on the internet, according to the Washington Post (and me). Amanda Brennan spends her days sifting “through the thousands of pieces of original content, from vines to videos to text posts — and from there, she catalogs ongoing trends, identifies up-and-coming blogs and documents the latest news in the Tumblrverse.”
As Brennan explains, archiving memes allows you to link back to the original source, the person who created the content in the first place giving them the credit they deserve. It also lets you see the bigger picture of the history of where a source originated from and the path it has taken through the internet and through social media and culture.
Her path to Meme Librarian at Tumblr seemed destined as she talked about her fascination with the website Audio Galaxy as a teenager. The website “would show you a genre of music and all the bands associated with it and then it would connect them”. It was her first introduction into taxonomy and how things were related. At Rutger’s University where she earned her MLIS, they had a specialization in social media and she knew this was what she wanted to pursue. She even contacted the website Know Your Meme and asked if there were any internship opportunities for librarians. She interned with them after her first year of library school which cultivated her interests in memes, vines, and things that go viral.
