Heather Kotula is the President and CEO of Access Innovations, Inc. Her role encompasses the company’s strategy as well as overseeing operations management, including marketing, communications, and sales, corporate finance, infrastructure and administration, and work for clients.

Heather has been active in the company full time since 1996. She has been involved in taxonomy works, including creating, implementing, and oversight of several taxonomies including medical databases, the original Getty AATA, and the original AOL taxonomy which supported their search for many years. She is keenly interested in artificial intelligence and its inner workings. She set up and ran the Missoula, Montana office for Access Innovations specifically for work on the AOL Search database and taxonomy. She is known for her creative presentations and publications at professional societies, recently including SLA, Taxonomy Boot Camp, NISOPlus, SSP, and the Charleston Conference. She is active on the professional side of the industry, having served in many capacities. She is a member of the SLA Board of Directors 2022-2027 serving as Secretary in 2024, President-Elect in 2025, and President in 2026. She is also active in the Society for Scholarly Publishing, having served on the Marketing Committee and as that committee’s liaison to the Generations Fund Committee. She edited The TaxoBook, written by Marjorie M. K. Hlava, a three-volume book set from Springer, used in library and information science schools throughout the world.