Dr. Lorraine J. Haricombe is the Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries at The University of Texas at Austin where she provides strategic leadership for twelve library collections including several storage facilities in Austin and in College Station, Texas. She has previously served as Dean of the University of Kansas Libraries (2006-15), where she was Provost’s Designate for implementing the Open Access policy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, the first public university in the USA after Harvard University and MIT where faculty adopted an institutional policy on Open Access.
She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and served as President of the ARL from September, 2019 – October, 2020. She has held several leadership positions including Chair of the Steering Committee of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC); Chair of the Greater Western Alliance of Libraries (GWLA) and is an elected member of the International Federation of Library Associations’ (IFLA) Standing Committee on Academic and Research Libraries. She serves on Harvard Libraries’ Visiting Committee and on the Hesburgh Libraries Advisory Council at Notre Dame University. In 2018 – 2019 then Provost McInnis named her as co-chair of the Provost’s Task Force on the “Future of UT Libraries.” In 2020-2021, Interim Provost Dan Jaffe named her and Dean of the iSChool, Eric Meyer, as co-chairs of the campus-wide Work Group for Sustainable Open Scholarship.
Lorraine Haricombe has been a library leader on two continents and speaks and writes about transformation of libraries, leadership and open access nationally and internationally. She holds doctoral and master’s degrees in library and information science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
