Life of Links

Although Jill Grogg's childhood ambition was to “own a flower shop,” instead she pursued degrees in English. She found, however, that “familiarity with Prufrock and cursory knowledge of The Fairie Queene are not qualifications listed in many job ads.” Her husband, formerly a public library director in Maine, suggested librarianship.

The two native Southerners were homesick and happily landed at the University of Tennessee. There she “met one of the most influential people in my life: Carol Tenopir.” As Tenopir's grad assistant in 2000, Grogg coauthored an article on linking and OpenURL—as she says, “really before the first commercially available link resolver hit the market.”

Since then, the technology has been widely implemented, and she has published widely on the subject. For Searcher magazine Grogg is the “go-to person on anything to do with linking,” says editor Barbara Quint.

“The OpenURL framework and its implementation via link resolvers solve a very real, very immediate need: to provide a seamless infrastructure of links that directs patrons to the right copy of a given electronic content item for them,” says Grogg. “To ignore linking is to ignore our core purpose of putting the right resource in the right hands at the right time.”

On stressful days, Grogg continues “to daydream about floriculture,” but her passion lies with linking. “The power of the web itself is its hyperlinks,” she says. “The power of our networked collections in the digital library should be the invisible web of links that connects researchers from one idea to the next.”