There is a particular kind of silence in a university reference library on a Tuesday afternoon. The soft percussion of fingers on keyboard keys. The occasional whisper of a cart wheeling past the stacks. Anne-Marie K. Green knew that silence for fifteen years before she decided to recreate something like it on the open web.
It was 2009, and Green had just left her position as reference librarian at a mid-sized public university in the upper Midwest. She was forty-three, recently divorced, and uncertain whether the profession she'd trained for still existed in the form she remembered. The internet had been eating at library science for years the database subscriptions, the discovery layers, the way students increasingly walked past the reference desk with questions already half-answered by Google. Green loved the work. She wasn't sure the work loved her back.
So she did what any thorough researcher does when the landscape shifts: she started documenting it.
The Card Catalog Habit
Green grew up in Marquette, Michigan, the daughter of a high school history teacher and a postal worker. She earned her MLS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1994, during the early years when the profession was still debating whether online catalogs would replace the physical card file. They didn't, of course or rather, they replaced one kind of catalog with another, and the habit of cataloging persisted.
"The card catalog wasn't a technology," Green wrote in a 2012 essay for the journal Library Trends. "It was a philosophy. The discipline of deciding what a thing was, where it belonged, and how someone else might find it that discipline survives any medium."
That philosophy became the spine of everything she built after leaving academia. Her personal website, which launched in early 2010 under the modest URL reference-annotations.net, began as a hobby a place to collect and annotate links she found useful in her post-library life. She was reading widely, following threads through academic blogs, government reports, niche newsletters, and obscure institutional sites. She was doing what she'd always done: helping people find things.
But the audience had changed. Instead of students walking up to a desk, she had readers who found her through search, through word of mouth, through the growing network of researchers who were building their own personal knowledge systems online. Green wasn't a blogger. She was something closer to a librarian without a library a curator without an institution, organizing the web's edges with the same rigor she'd applied to physical collections.
What She Built
The collection grew slowly, almost imperceptibly. Green added links the way a cataloger adds records: with care, with context, with the understanding that someone would eventually need to find this thing through a path they hadn't yet imagined.
By 2014, her site contained roughly 3,400 annotated links organized across twelve subject categories. The categories themselves were revealing: Archival Methodology, Public Records Access, Community Information Systems, Digital Preservation Standards, Local History Networks. These weren't the categories of a general-interest portal. They were the categories of someone who had spent years answering reference questions at a public university someone who knew exactly where people hit walls.
The annotations were the distinctive feature. Unlike link directories of the era, which often consisted of bare URLs with brief titles, Green's entries read like reference desk notes. Each one included a summary of what the source contained, who it was useful for, any limitations or quirks in the content, and occasionally, a note about when the source had been updated or checked.
"Most link collections treat the link as the product," Green explained in a 2015 interview with the American Libraries Association newsletter. "I think the annotation is the product. The URL is just the address. The annotation is the knowledge."
This approach had roots in the traditional practice of pathfinder guides those annotated bibliographies and resource lists that reference librarians assembled for research topics. In the pre-web era, pathfinders were printed and distributed at the reference desk. Green had written dozens of them during her library career. Her website was, in essence, a pathfinder that kept growing.
The Methodology in Public
What made Green's collection unusual wasn't just its scope or its annotations. It was the fact that she published her methodology alongside the collection.
In 2013, she released a document titled "Selection Criteria for Web-Based Reference Resources: A Working Framework." The framework outlined the principles she used to decide what to include: authority (who publishes it), coverage (how thoroughly it addresses its subject), currency (how often it's updated), access (whether it's freely available or behind paywalls), and stability (whether the URL is likely to persist).
The document circulated quietly among library science programs. Several university courses adopted it as a supplementary reading for digital curation units. Green didn't market it. She posted it as a PDF on her site and let it find its audience.
"Anne-Marie's framework was one of the first attempts to formalize what we were all doing intuitively," said Dr. Patricia Hernandez, a associate professor of library science at the University of North Carolina, in a 2018 article for Information Research. "Before her document, there was no shared language for evaluating web resources the way we'd been evaluating print resources for decades. She gave us that language."
The framework went through three revisions between 2013 and 2022, with each iteration incorporating feedback from educators and practitioners who had adapted it for their own contexts. Green maintained a changelog on her site, documenting every revision with a brief note about what had changed and why. This transparency was characteristic of her approach: she treated her own work as a living document, subject to revision and improvement.
The Community That Grew Around It
Green never built a social media presence in the conventional sense. She didn't tweet, didn't maintain a Facebook page, didn't produce a podcast. But a community grew around her work anyway.
It started with email. Readers would write to her with corrections a link that had gone dead, a source that had moved, a new resource that deserved inclusion. Green responded to every message personally, usually within a few days. Over time, a small network of correspondents emerged: archivists, local historians, public librarians, graduate students, and independent researchers who had found in Green's collection a reliable foundation for their own work.
In 2016, a group of these readers organized an informal "annotation circle" a monthly email thread in which participants shared and reviewed new links in their respective fields. Green facilitated the circle for two years before stepping back, handing the coordination to a public librarian in Oregon named David Chen who had been an active participant from the start.
"Anne-Marie built something that felt like a public good," Chen said in a 2020 interview for the Public Library Association blog. "Not a product, not a platform a public good. The kind of thing that belongs to everyone because everyone contributed to it, even if they didn't realize they were contributing."
The Transition Years
By the late 2010s, Green's collection had grown to more than 8,000 annotated links. She had moved twice first to a small town in Vermont, then to a rural property outside of Eugene, Oregon. She was teaching occasional online courses for library science programs, consulting for small libraries on digital organization projects, and continuing to maintain her site with the same methodical care she had applied from the beginning.
But the infrastructure was aging. The site ran on a platform Green had built herself in 2009, using tools that were increasingly difficult to maintain. In 2021, she began a quiet migration to a new system, working in the open but without announcement. She posted updates to a development log, invited technical feedback from her correspondents, and moved slowly a few hundred links at a time more than risk disrupting the collection's integrity.
The migration was completed in 2023. The new site included improved search functionality, better mobile access, and a structured data layer that made the annotations machine-readable. Green had spent four years on the project, working mostly in the evenings, funded partly by modest consulting income and partly by a small grant from the Knight Foundation's digital news and information program.
"The grant wasn't for the collection itself," Green noted in her final project report. "It was for the infrastructure the system that keeps the collection alive. The collection is the work. The infrastructure is the care."
What This Means for Lnk2It Readers
Link curation is often treated as a technical problem how to organize, how to tag, how to surface. Green's work reminds us that it's also a philosophical problem, and maybe even an ethical one. Every link included is a judgment about value. Every annotation is a small act of trust between curator and reader.
For Lnk2It readers who build link collections whether for research, for business, or for community the principles Green articulated in her 2013 framework remain useful touchstones. Authority, coverage, currency, access, stability: these criteria don't answer every question, but they ask the right ones. They force a curator to articulate why a resource matters, not just that it exists.
Green's work also offers a model for sustainability. She built her collection over more than a decade without outside funding, without a team, without the pressure to monetize or scale. She built it the way a librarian builds a collection: slowly, deliberately, with an eye toward permanence. The infrastructure matters because the content matters. The care is in the details.
For readers interested in applying these principles to their own curation work, Green's published framework and her public development logs offer a rare thing: a transparent record of how a thoughtful curator thinks and revises. It's not a template. It's a conversation.
The Collection Today
As of early 2026, Green's site contains over 11,000 annotated links across seventeen subject categories. The categories have evolved to reflect changes in the web landscape new sections on open data repositories, digital scholarship tools, and community information platforms have been added over the years. Older sections have been archived but not removed; Green maintains a clear policy of noting when resources are historical more than deleting them.
The annotation circle that David Chen took over in 2018 continues to operate, now with participants from eleven countries. Chen has expanded the format to include monthly video calls and a shared Zotero library. Green remains a participant, though she stepped down as a facilitator in 2020. She still answers email.
In 2024, Green published a monograph with ABC-CLIO titled Curating the Distributed Web: A Practitioner's Guide to Link Collection and Annotation. The book draws on her site's development logs, her framework documents, and her correspondence with the annotation circle to construct a comprehensive account of her methods. It is, in her words, "the reference guide I wish I'd had when I started."
The book has been adopted as a supplementary text in fourteen library science programs across North America and Europe. Green did not seek these adoptions; they found their way to her through instructors who had been following her work for years.
The Quiet Persistence of Useful Work
There is a question that follows Anne-Marie Green's story, though she has never posed it herself: why does this kind of work endure?
The web has no shortage of link collections, resource directories, and annotated bibliographies. Most of them go stale. The links die, the domains expire, the curator moves on. The infrastructure of the web is designed for novelty, for the new, for the next thing. Building something meant to last requires a kind of stubbornness that the ecosystem doesn't reward.
Green's answer, if she were to give one, would probably be simple. She builds what she builds because people need it. They write to her and say so. They correct her and say so. They build their own work on top of hers and say so. The collection persists because it is useful, and it is useful because it was built with care.
That logic is old, older than the web, older than libraries themselves. A thing exists to be found. A record exists to be consulted. The archivist's work is to make the connection between the question and the answer, even when the question hasn't been asked yet.
Anne-Marie Green left the reference desk in 2009. She never stopped doing the work.
Where to Read Further
Those interested in exploring Green's work directly can start with her reference-annotations.net site, which hosts the full collection along with her framework documents and development logs. The site includes a subject browse, a keyword search, and a directory of contributors to the annotation circle.
Her monograph, Curating the Distributed Web, is available through ABC-CLIO's catalog and through major academic booksellers. The book includes extensive appendices with sample annotations, evaluation checklists, and case studies from the annotation circle's first five years.
For the library science context, Green's 2012 essay "The Philosophy of the Card Catalog in a Digital Age" remains one of the most-cited pieces on the relationship between traditional cataloging principles and web-based resource organization. It was published in Library Trends, Volume 61, Number 2, and is available through most academic library databases.
The Knight Foundation's 2021 grant report, which documents the infrastructure migration project, is available through the Knight Foundation grants database. It includes detailed notes on the technical decisions made during the migration and the rationale behind them.
Reader Guide: Key Themes in Anne-Marie Green's Work
| Theme | Primary Source | Key Insight for Curators |
|---|---|---|
| Selection criteria for web resources | Selection Criteria for Web-Based Reference Resources (2013, revised 2022) | Authority, coverage, currency, access, and stability provide a shared language for evaluating digital resources |
| The annotation as the product | ALA Newsletter interview (2015) | Context and summary add more value than the URL itself; the curator's judgment is the curation |
| Infrastructure as care | Knight Foundation grant report (2023) | Sustainability requires investment in the systems that maintain content, not just the content itself |
| Card catalog philosophy | Library Trends essay (2012) | Cataloging principles survive their medium; the discipline of organization is portable |
| Community-driven curation | Annotation circle facilitation notes (2016–2020) | Distributed contribution and peer review improve accuracy and expand coverage beyond one curator's expertise |
FAQs
Who is Anne-Marie K. Green?
Anne-Marie K. Green is a former academic reference librarian who has spent the past two decades building and maintaining an extensive annotated collection of web-based reference resources. She holds an MLS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (1994) and worked in university library systems before transitioning to independent digital curation work in 2009. She is the author of Curating the Distributed Web: A Practitioner's Guide to Link Collection and Annotation (ABC-CLIO, 2024).
What is the reference collection Green built?
The collection, hosted at reference-annotations.net, contains over 11,000 annotated links organized across seventeen subject categories. Unlike general link directories, each entry includes a substantive annotation describing the source's content, usefulness, limitations, and currency. The collection spans topics including archival methodology, public records access, community information systems, digital preservation standards, local history networks, open data repositories, and digital scholarship tools.
What framework did Green develop for evaluating web resources?
Green's Selection Criteria for Web-Based Reference Resources: A Working Framework (first published in 2013, revised through 2022) outlines five criteria for evaluating web-based sources: authority (who publishes it), coverage (how thoroughly it addresses its subject), currency (how often it's updated), access (whether it's freely available), and stability (whether the URL is likely to persist). The framework has been adopted as supplementary reading in library science programs and is frequently cited in discussions of digital curation methodology.
How does Green's collection stay current?
Green maintains the collection through a combination of personal curation and community contribution. An informal annotation circle of researchers and practitioners has operated since 2016, with participants sharing and reviewing new resources in their respective fields. Green responds personally to reader corrections and updates, and she maintains a public development log documenting changes to the collection and its infrastructure. The 2021–2023 infrastructure migration added improved search functionality and structured data to support ongoing maintenance.
What can link curators learn from Green's approach?
Green's work offers several principles applicable to link curation at any scale: invest in annotations beyond just links; apply explicit evaluation criteria consistently; treat infrastructure as a long-term commitment, not a one-time build; and cultivate community feedback to improve accuracy and coverage over time. Her published framework documents and development logs provide a transparent record of how these principles have been applied in practice, making them useful models for curators building their own collections.