Questia, based in Chicago, Illinois, was founded in 1998 and purchased by Gale, part of Cengage Learning, in January 2010.

The library was strongest in books and journal articles in the social sciences and humanities, with many older historical texts.

The Questia service also featured tools to automatically create citations and bibliographies, helping writers to properly cite the materials.

Bell for referring to itself as an academic library, when it concentrated on the liberal arts and treated users as customers rather than students.

Although some of its employees had advanced library degrees, they did not work or collaborate with faculty to develop collections that served distinctive student populations.