Lipow was born in Manchester, New Hampshire and was raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. Her brother is physicist Lee Grodzins, and her sister, Ethel Grodzins Romm, is an author and Co-Chair of the Lyceum Society. She moved to Berkeley, California, from New York with her first husband Arthur Lipow in 1957 to attend graduate school. She received her MLS degree from UC Berkeley's Library School, graduating in 1960. She joined the staff of the UC Berkeley Library in 1961. In 1973 she created the BAKER document delivery service, which remains in service today. In 1982 she was appointed Education Officer for the UC Berkeley Libraries. In that role she developed a series of technology and library training courses for faculty, staff, and students. She retired as UC's library information officer in 1991 to start her own consulting service Library Solutions Institute.
Library Solutions Institute and Press
The first event that her newly founded Library Solutions Institute offered was a full-day of hands-on Internet training for librarians, in June 1992. Scheduled to coincide with the annual conference of The American Library Association in San Francisco, it was held over two days in Berkeley, for two different cohorts of trainees. Spanning both groups of trainees was a reception and a talk by Clifford Lynch. required Anne and her colleagues John Ober and Roy Tennant to develop handouts describing various Internet protocols and services. The handouts were collected into a binder for workshop participants. Following the workshop, Lipow decided to publish the binder as a book. She changed the name of Library Solutions Institute to Library Solutions Institute and Press and published the book in the Fall of 1992 as Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook. This was the same year that O'Reilly and Associates published "one of the first popular books about the Internet". Library Solutions Institute and Press went on to publish dozens of titles relating to libraries, technology, and new strategies for serving library clientele. Various workshops were also held around the world regarding these topics.
Influence
Anne Lipow and her colleagues created the first training materials on how to use the Internet for librarians. These materials were then used for workshops put on by the Library Solutions Institute and Press, UC Berkeley Extension, Infopeople, and other professional organizations. Crossing the Internet Threshold was translated into Romanian, Bulgarian, and Turkish, and used in those countries to train librarians. It was also translated into Spanish and used widely in South America and elsewhere. Her publications on the changing nature of reference work in libraries were very influential, and led to invited speaking engagements around the world.
