Karen Markey is professor emerita in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Her experience with online searching began with the earliest commercial systems, DIALOG, Orbit, and BRS, the first end-user systems, CD-ROMs and online catalogs, and includes today's open web search engines and proprietary systems for accessing databases of bibliographic records, abstracting & indexing entries, full texts, numeric data, and multimedia. Since joining the faculty at Michigan in 1987, she has taught online searching to thousands of students in her school's library and information science (LIS) program. Her research has been supported by the Council on Library Resources, Delmas Foundation (DF), Department of Education (DoED), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), National Science Foundation (NSF), and OCLC. She is the author of six books, more than a dozen major research reports, and over one hundred journal articles and conference proceedings papers.

Cheryl Knott is a professor in the School of Information at the University of Arizona. While working as a professional librarian at the University of Texas Perry-Castaneda Library in the 1990s, she took all the training made available by database vendors and also learned on the job from colleagues in the reference services department. At the University of Arizona, she teaches an information intermediation course, with an emphasis on online searching, in the master's program in library and information science. Her government information course also helps students learn how to search official federal websites and databases. She designed and teaches an undergraduate online searching course that fulfills the research requirement for students in undergraduate programs in the iSchool. Her undergraduate textbook, Find the Information You Need!: Resources and Techniques for Making Decisions, Solving Problems, and Answering Questions, was published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2016.