Keerthi has been working with library faculty to further establish Scholarly Communication services and initiatives in the University Libraries. Her responsibilities involve providing support to the Scholars Archive Administrator to help investigate ways to improve workflows, create training materials, and assist with projects for ingesting content into the University at Albany’s open access digital repository, Scholars Archive. She will work with the Scholarly Communication Librarian to research implementation of open resource data management tools (e.g. DMPTool) and develop a strategy for local application. In addition, Keerthi will be collaborating with the Libraries’ Open Educational Resources (OER) liaison to update content for the OER libguide and help with other OER initiatives as needed. 

Cross-institutional efforts are gaining traction to help strengthen systems used to create, disseminate, and preserve research and scholarly works at UAlbany. For example, a UAlbany campus open access policy is being developed. This past fall, the Faculty Senate passed an OER Resolution, which encourages a deeper engagement with OER on campus. Additionally, the Division of Research recently established a Data Security Task Force, which has been charged with building a structure for and policies around the University's research data management (RDM), security, and computing needs. As the Libraries continue to maintain involvement with these developments and have been laying groundwork to support a more open scholarly ecosystem at UAlbany, these efforts will become amplified. Keerthi’s contributions will help the libraries to continue preparations as we position ourselves to be collaborators, liaisons, and educators within the Scholarly Communication system to help foster a culture of openness at the university.