It's 1963. The newly hired university librarian laboriously types up note cards to catalogue water resource documents that graduate students use to study environmental policies. The librarian, Gloriana St. Clair, takes a break to help a graduate student who is creating a term paper bibliography, poring through bound periodical indexes and card catalogues. The student is relieved when St. Clair locates 10 pertinent sources.

In 2009, online search engines can generate hundreds of thousands of sources in seconds. St. Clair now helps students determine which ones are relevant, reliable, and timely. Having edited prestigious scholarly journals, earned advanced degrees, and taught literature and library management, St. Clair knows how to distinguish quality, refereed scholarship from biased or commercial materials posing as real academic work. "Nobody knows you're a dog on the Internet," she says.

St. Clair has served as a librarian and scholar for more than 45 years, the past 10 as dean of university libraries at Carnegie Mellon. She believes that the digitization of scholarship makes this a particularly exciting time to be a librarian. "I just love books, and I love connecting students with information," she says. "When I became a librarian, it was all about scarcity. Now it's about overload."

For her work, St. Clair recently received one her field's highest honors. The Association of College and Research Libraries, representing thousands of academic and research librarians, has named her the 2009 Academic/Research Librarian of the Year.
  —Mark Kramer