Merryll S. Penson was born on December 20, 1948 in Belle Grade, Florida. Her father was a minister at Tuskegee, Alabama and her mother was a librarian at Tuskegee University. She attended Tuskegee Institute High School for the 9th and 10th grades, and she completed 11th and 12th grade graduating from Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts. She received her BA from Grinnell College in Iowa, her MSLS from Atlanta University and her MBA from Virginia Commonwealth University . Ms. Penson was the associate director for collection management at VCU before becoming director of the Schwob Memorial Library at Columbus State University (then Columbus College) in 1984. Apart from her university activities, she was appointed to the Muscogee County School Board in Columbus, Georgia in 1989 and served until 1993. As director of the library at Columbus College she was instrumental in developing the Library's on-line information resources. While at CSU, she served with the group which did the original GALILEO proposal and led selection and implementation efforts for GALILEO Interconnected Libraries. At the same time, she was a very active member of several professional and civic organizations. After leaving CSU in 1997 she became the associate university librarian at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, as well as serving on the Executive Committee of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, the Board of Directors of SOLINET, and the President of the OCLC Users Council.