As Associate Dean for Research and Informatics, Julie Speer leads efforts to map and integrate the Libraries’ resources, expertise, and services to the university’s research enterprise. For the past eight years, Speer has been involved in the development of digital library services designed to provide preservation, visualization, and Open Access (OA) strategies for institutional and inter-institutional digital research, scholarship, and cultural heritage collections. Speer has served as project staff on various inter-institutional sponsored research projects aimed at advancing the transformative role of libraries within the academy as knowledge specialists in the open web, working with leaders in these areas throughout North America. Her work and research interests involve understanding local and global research environment issues (e.g. policies governing the sharing and management of data and information), the research and scholarly outputs produced by disciplinary and trans-disciplinary communities of knowledge, knowledge production, digital repositories, and digital curation processes in research workflows. Her efforts have been aimed at enabling faculty and students to engage in open access and to become knowledgeable and successful in current, and increasingly more open, research environments. She seeks to inspire a dialogue on campus on the paths we take to innovation as researchers, students, and teachers to become more productive, competitive, collaborative, and creative within the context of a global, networked infrastructure.