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.  Dr. Haricombe previously served as Dean of the University of Kansas Libraries (2006-15).  During her time there she also served as Provost’s Designate for implementing the Open Access policy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, making it the first public university in the United States and the third overall after Harvard University and MIT to have faculty adopt an institutional policy on Open Access.

Dr. Haricombe 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 – September 2020. She has held several leadership positions, including Chair of the Steering Committee of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and Chair of the Greater Western Alliance of Libraries (GWLA).  Dr. Haricombe is also 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. The Provost McInnis named her as co-chair of the Provost’s Task Force on the “Future of UT Libraries” for 2018-2019.

Dr. Haricombe has been a library leader on two continents and speaks and writes about transformation of libraries, leadership, and open access both nationally and internationally. She holds doctoral and master’s degrees in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.