Elaine L. Westbrooks received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1998, and her master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1999. She first came to Cornell University Library in 2000 as a metadata librarian at Albert R. Mann Library. In 2005, she became a senior metadata librarian, and she was selected to be the head of metadata services in 2006. In this position, Westbrooks developed and strengthened strategic alliances with other library units to position metadata services as an integral component of Cornell University Library’s digital collections.

In 2008, Westbrooks became the associate dean for library operations at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In this role, she provided strategic, managerial, staff development, and operational leadership for technical services, research and instruction services, the branch libraries, and the data curation program. In 2012, Westbrooks was selected to be the associate university librarian for research at the University of Michigan, where she coordinated and administered support for the university’s research enterprise while providing operational leadership to its copyright office, Asia library, area studies, and most of its subject specialists. From 2017 to 2022, Westbrooks served as the university librarian and vice provost for University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she was responsible for the University Libraries’ annual budget of $45 million. 

An expert who has been interviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Vox,Westbrooks coauthored Metadata in Practice with Diane Hillmann in 2004 and coedited Academic Library Management: Case Studies with Tammy Nickelson Dearie and Michael Meth in 2017. She is also a much sought-out speaker on diversity, equity, and inclusion in libraries and other topics related to scholarly communications and leadership. In recognition of her acumen and her efforts to build strategic partnerships across borders, she was honored with the Foreign Expert Award by Fudan University in Shanghai, China, in 2015 and 2016.

Westbrooks serves on the board of numerous organizations, including Sage Publishing, the Center for Open Science, the Digital Public Library of America, and the MIT Visiting Committee for Libraries.

As the chief administrative officer of Cornell University Library, Westbrooks leads one of the world’s most innovative research libraries and university presses, empowering scholarship at Cornell and beyond.