The Internet Archive’s Nick Norman has won a 2024 Anthem Community Voice Award in the category for Best Use of Technology. The Anthem Awards honor mission-driven individuals, companies and organizations worldwide, inspiring global change.
Read Norman’s submission essay, “Scanning the Past to Empower the Future.” Learn more about the award.
Norman began volunteering with Internet Archive’s Open Library in 2019, where the Tennessee native took on a variety of responsibilities, including the communications lead in Open Library’s Fellowship program. Now he is a digital technician, assisting on a variety of digitization projects. He has scanned documents from the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies Library, the Graduate Theological Union and others.
Making vital documents available to the public is a privilege, he said, and provides important clues about the past that can inform future decisions.
“It’s like breadcrumbs,” Norman said of the knowledge he helps share with users. “Each piece we scan is a breadcrumb, a fragment of a story. People can pick them up, follow the trail, and discover something meaningful — and that’s what I want to do: help people pick them up and see where they lead.”
Norman, whose parents are both librarians, said he was drawn to the work because of his interest in learning and commitment to accessibility of knowledge for all.
“I think about all the materials out there that we get to touch through digitization,” Norman said. “The ability to make significant change or have a profound impact is right at our fingertips.”
Norman considers the documents he has digitized through the course of his work. Some of the materials were given out at meetings or in boardrooms and filed away for safekeeping in places out of reach. He says digitization cracks the knowledge in these materials open again and ushers in new potential.
“It simply takes pulling up a chair at the computer, looking at [the materials] and seeing how I can harness or leverage this to fill in gaps of information that people didn’t even know was out there,” Norman said. “We’re doing something that can make the world a better place.”
Norman hopes the award shines a spotlight on the Internet Archive’s mission to make knowledge accessible to all, adding: “My goal is to use my expertise in community engagement and building partnerships to draw attention to meaningful work, such as what we’re doing here.”
Congratulations Nick on your reward! I’m glad you found something to work at that you have such a compassion for and that will help others.
Congratulations, Norman! Also, I’d love to know what the equipment is in the background of the picture. Is there anything you can share?
Mr. Norman,
Congratulations on your award, but more importantly your overall appreciation on digitalization as an important element in the future of civilization.
Thank you and All the Best,
Clearly Norman your approach to this problem of forgotten information is of great value. Some of this information never manages even to get serious attention it deserves because it is either so far away from the accepted way to think about the topic in question, or it challenges the existing ideas with a new perspective for researching and investigating the topic. I am wondering which of these reasons is the most common, and for the one that gets the least fair treatment, how much of your valuable time can you spend on rectifying this fault.
I am writing this because my particular innovation seems to not be acceptable to the experts, although they never say why this is so. It is about the desperate need to convert the vague and pseudo-science of macroeconomics into true science that is much more logical than the intuitive and biased methods of the past.