Our Events

Special Event

Building a More Democratic Internet: A Conversation with Sarah Lamdan

Wednesday, September 21, 2022 - 6:00 PM | Members' Room | for members and guests | free of charge | registration required

In her forthcoming book Data Cartels, Sarah Lamdan, Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law, examines the ways privatization and tech exceptionalism have prevented us from creating effective legal regulation. She calls for treating information like a public good and creating digital infrastructure that supports our democratic ideals. She'll join us for a conversation about how we build this digital infrastructure, hosted by Emily Drabinski, President-Elect of the American Library Association, and accompanied by Brewster Kahle, Founder of the Internet Archive. Light refreshments will be served.

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Sarah Lamdan is a Professor of Law with a Master’s Degree in Library Science and Legal Information Management. She teaches administrative law, environmental law, data privacy, information access, and government transparency courses. Her 2017 book Environmental Information: Research, Access & Environmental Decisionmaking (Environmental Law Institute) is a resource for journalists, scientists, and researchers who rely on government science. When she’s not teaching, Professor Lamdan is active in national information access and data privacy research and organizations. She is a Senior Fellow with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and a fellow at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU School of Law. She’s also a member of the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) and a co-chair of the Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Community Oversight Council.

Emily Drabinski is Critical Pedagogy Librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center and President-Elect of the American Library Association. Drabinski also serves as editor for Gender & Sexuality in Information Studies, a book series from Library Juice Press/Litwin Books. In 2016, Drabinski and the entire faculty at Long Island University, Brooklyn, were locked out by their employers for 12 days during a contract negotiation, the first such action in the history of U.S. higher education. Since that struggle, Drabinski has published and presented widely on the importance of collective action for library workers and the communities they serve.

Brewster Kahle is the Founder & Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 99+ unique petabytes of data - the books, Web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage, working with more than 950 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all.


This event is co-sponsored by the Library and the Internet Archive.


REGISTER HERE