Sarah Lamdan, Senior Fellow
Sarah Lamdan is a SPARC Senior Fellow. She supports SPARC initiatives focusing on the evolution of library vendors into data analytics companies and vendors’ library surveillance and data brokering activities. She works with the SPARC team to support members in better understanding vendors’ transition to data analytics and data brokering, and how those changes lead to increased library surveillance. She also helps SPARC track new developments related to surveillance and in take steps to address privacy threats.
Sarah is a Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law. Before teaching law, Sarah was a law librarian and research analyst in private and academic libraries. Her teaching and research focus on information laws and policies, addressing topics across the informational spectrum from public information access to personal data privacy. She has authored several books about information issues, including a resource for government science research called Environmental Information: Research, Access & Environmental Decisionmaking (Environmental Law Institute, 2017) and a book describing publishers’ transitions to data analytics companies called Data Cartels (Stanford University Press, Forthcoming 2022).
Sarah also works on information access and data privacy initiatives with groups like the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, IOI (Invest in Open Infrastructure), and various data privacy and immigration advocacy organizations.
Sarah is based in New York, but she is a Kansan at heart who earned her law degree from the University of Kansas and a Masters Degree in Legal Information Management from Emporia State University’s School of Library and Information Management.
