back from the conference, hoping to inform potential services that Democracy’s Library, and its partners, may be able to provide to help bring democracy more so into the digital age.
We thank FWD50 for the invitation to present and participate in this fabulous event! It’s truly an honor to be among so many passionate
and incredible innovators and public
servants.I really value having the Wayback Machine fresh mobile database as an additional tool in my librarian’s toolbox,” Mann said. “Information preservation is an essential,
but often overlooked, part of the infrastructure for teaching and learning.”
Mann, currently working as the Systems & Discovery Librarian at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB), said he first learned about the value of the Internet Archive in 2006 during his library science master’s program.
Over his career, Mann has worked at
various libraries, tapping into the Archive on the job.artists as Arts Librarian at University of Redlands, Mann found that the vast amount of free information online, including biographies, can shape students’ projects.
“We can draw on the Archive whenever – what career paths are available? we need inspiration for creative work, or when we need to understand how current scholarship and the issues that we’re facing now aren’t completely new—they’re based on this history of work by scholars, by politicians, by citizens active in the public interest,” he said. “These issues tend to
recur over time. As a society, we need to
know where we have been in order to meet the challenges of the future.”
At CSUSB, Mann also helps computer science consumer data and business students use the Archive’s collections to better understand the cultural roots of new technologies—the historical context for their innovations.