Dr. Cook helped develop and promote LibQUAL+®, the premier assessment tool for measuring library service quality internationally. She was co-principal investigator (with Fred Heath, Duane Webster, and Martha Kyrillidou) of a three-year grant for the initial LibQUAL+® project supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) and managed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and Texas A&M University. 

At Texas A&M University, Dr. Cook chairs the Educational Environment Council.  She serves on the American Library Association (ALA) Committee on Research and Statistics.  She is very active in library assessment, chairing both the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Statistics and Assessment Committee and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), Statistics and Evaluation Section Standing Committee.  She also serves on the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Science Advisory Board.   

She makes frequent presentations at national and international library and information conferences on library assessment, particularly LibQUAL+®, and service issues in ARL libraries.  She has published extensively on library management and information service issues.   Her work appears in performance measurement and library journals including Educational and Psychological Measurement, Library Trends, Library Quarterly, College and Research Libraries, Journal of Academic Librarianship, and portal.  Dr. Cook serves on the editorial advisory board for the Northumbria Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries.

She participated in the 2001 UCLA Senior Fellows Program.  She received the Outstanding Conference Paper Award in 2000 from the Southwest Educational Research Association (SERA) Conference (with co-author Bruce Thompson).   She also received the Distinguished Librarianship Award in 1992 from Texas A&M’s Association of Former Students.

She received the “Dissertation of the Year Award,” in 2001 from the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M where she earned her Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration.    She also holds B.A. and M.L.S. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and the M.A. from Texas A&M University.  She began her career as a serials cataloger at Texas A&M and worked in acquisitions and bibliographic access before becoming Associate Dean for Administration and Technical Services in 1993.  Prior to assuming her current position, she served as Executive Associate Dean of the Texas A&M University Libraries from 1996-2003.