Leadership
Heather Kotula
President and CEO
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 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 2022-2024 and is currently serving as Secretary. She is also active in the Society for Scholarly Publishing, serving 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 Morgan & Claypool used in library and information science schools throughout the world.
Marjorie Hlava
Founder, Chairman, Chief Science Officer
Margie Hlava is Chief Scientist, Chairman, and founder of Access Innovations, Inc. If you are curious about taxonomies and their implementation Margie is the one to talk with. She is currently convener of the ISO 25964 Information and documentation — Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies — Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval, management, and use. She contributed to the Z39.19 2005 Controlled Vocabulary and the Z39.85 Dublin Core standard development teams. She also created the taxonomy for the CrEdit standard, worked on the Z39.104 Standards Specific Ontology for Standards (SSOS), the DOI Syntax and DOI Contributed Metadata set, Open URL Standard Advisor, NISO Z39.88, and others. She served on the NISO board for five years and the NISO Content Board. She is past president several organizations, including NFAIS (2002-2003), American Society for Information Science and Technology – 1993 (ASIST), Documentation Abstracts 1990-1991, Hubbell Society Museum and Library (1994-1998). She has received many awards including the ASIST Award of Merit and Watson Davis Award, the NFAIS Miles Conrad and Ann Marie Cunningham Awards, the John Cotton Dana Award, Fellow in 2006, and Presidents Award in 1999 from the Special Libraries Association, where she also founded Taxonomy Division in 2009, and served on the Board of Directors of SLA (Twice), Hubbell Hall of Fame Award 2021, Woman of Influence in Technology, and has held numerous other positions in these and other organizations. She has given countless presentations domestically and internationally, including several keynote addresses. She has published more than two hundred articles and five books on information science topics and is a member of NKOS. Her research areas include furthering the productivity of content creation and the governance layer for metadata and information access through automated indexing, thesaurus development, taxonomy creation, natural language processing, machine translations, and machine aided indexing, and other knowledge organization systems (KOS) topics – all the building blocks that now go into the hot AI topics. She holds two patents with 21 claims addressing automation of information processing and tagging.
Dr. Jay Ven Eman
Chief Administration Officer
As the Chief Executive Officer of our company, Dr. Jay Ven Eman brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. He guides our sales, marketing, and strategic planning departments, and also helps build semantically enriched databases for our clients. With a focus on AI and knowledge organization systems, Jay is a popular speaker and has given many presentations, workshops, and seminars on a wide range of topics related to database development, file conversions, and markup languages such as HTML, XML, and SGML. Jay earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in organizational behavior from the University of Colorado, a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of New Mexico, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in business from the University of Washington. With his expertise and passion for innovation, you can trust that you’re in good hands when you work with Jay.
Bill Richardson
Chief Financial Officer
As our Chief Financial Officer, Bill Richardson oversees accounting, project cost accounting, cash flow forecasting, and special projects. With over 25 years of experience at Access Innovations, Bill is a key member of our team and has a degree in Finance from the Anderson School of Business at the University of New Mexico. He is also a member of the New Mexico Society of Certified Public Accountants. With his experience and dedication to excellence, Bill helps make sure our company is successful and our clients are happy.Bill Richardson is in charge of managing the money as our Chief Financial Officer. He handles accounting, project costs, cash flow forecasting, and special projects. He has worked at Access Innovations for over 25 years and studied Finance at the Anderson School of Business at the University of New Mexico. He’s also a member of the New Mexico Society of Certified Public Accountants. With his experience and dedication to excellence, Bill helps make sure our company is successful and our clients are happy.
