Pat Ensor received her Masters in Library Service in 1981 from the University of Alabama. While in library school, she served an internship with the IBM Santa Teresa Programming Laboratory Library in Santa Teresa, California, where she first began electronic searching. She is currently the Executive Director of Library Services at the University of Houston-Downtown, where she has been since January, 1999. This follows six years as the Head of Information Services at the University of Houston Libraries and previous positions as Coordinator of Electronic Information Services at Indiana State University and Reference Librarian at California State University, Long Beach.

She is the editor of two editions of the Cybrarian's Manual, an ALA Editions publication, as well as co-editor of Information Imagineering: Meeting at the Interface. She has been the co-editor of electronic serial Public-Access Computing Systems Review and editor of Information Standards Quarterly, the publication of the National Information Standards Organization. She has written and spoken widely about electronic information topics.

Pat Ensor was the president of the Library and Information Technology Association in 2002-2003. She chaired the LITA National Forum Program Committee for 1999 and 2000, and was the founder of the Top Technology Trends Committee.