John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom
Born	John Ockerbloom 1966 (age 50–51)
Education	PhD
Occupation	Software engineer
Employer	University of Pennsylvania
Known for	Online Books Page
Notable work	(see bibliography)
Title	Digital library architect
Notes

John Mark Ockerbloom (born 1966) is a digital library architect and planner in the library science field. Formerly at Carnegie Mellon University, from which he earned a PhD in computer science, he now works for the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of The Online Books Page, which lists over two million books including project Gutenberg titles, all of which are freely available for reading online or by download.

Mark Ockerbloom attended Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s and earned a PhD in computer science.

Mark Ockerbloom works as a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is involved in the use of technology by the general public for the public good. He is the chair of the ILS-DI Task Group for the Digital Library Federation.

In 1994, Mark Ockerbloom created Banned Books On-Line in response to the censoring of usenet newsgroups on Carnegie Mellon's servers. A number of organizations including Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union were opposing the Communications Decency Act around that time and took note of Banned Books On-Line, linking to it from their websites.

In 1998, Mark Ockerbloom joined as a plaintiff along with columnist Rob Morse of the San Francisco Examiner, the ACLU and others in a federal lawsuit against a library using web filtering software. The Loudoun County Library in Virginia installed X-Stop filtering software created by Log-On Data Corporation. The filtering software stopped library patrons from visiting the websites of the San Francisco Examiner, The San Francisco Chronicle and Ockerbloom's Banned Books On-Line.

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