Amanda Brennan


Amanda Brennan is a content and community associate at Tumblr. She is known as the "meme librarian" there, as she goes through Tumblr's content and catalogs trends. She began her career at Know Your Meme where she gained her nickname. Due to her history cataloging trends, she also has been called, "The Librarian for the Internet." She is frequently in the news called upon as a speaker in the press for her expertise on internet memes and data about internet memes.

Education and early life

Brennan attended Drew University, graduating in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a minor in Linguistics. In 2011 she earned her Master of Library and Information Science degree from Rutgers University.

Meme librarianship

In a 2014 interview for the Library of Congress blog, Brennan describes the importance of cataloging memes, saying "Recording these smaller moments are like recording local history, tiny bits that make up a whole that would have been incomplete in the future. They’re also representative of how current culture reacts to life, which will be important to understand how this era thought about the world." She continued those thoughts in 2015, remarking to the Washington Post that, "The importance of sitting down to find these sources gives the creator the credit he/she deserves. Sometimes it gets buried under all the we-heart-its and the rebloggys, but without sitting down and saying, “This is important,” the creator loses his content – and that’s not fair."

Publications