Julia Gelfand, UC Irvine Libraries’ applied sciences and engineering librarian, has received a 2025/2026 Fulbright US Scholar Program Award from the US Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board to join the library staff at the Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) in Palaplye, Botswana. This is Gelfand’s second Fulbright Award, as she was the 1992/1993 US/UK Fulbright Librarian at Imperial College and Science Museum Libraries.

Gelfand will work with BIUST library staff to develop onboarding and orientation sessions, including information literacy for new university students, faculty, researchers, and visitors as the campus grows and expands its role across new and emerging subject areas. She will also explore how librarians can advance a more robust open-access publishing strategy within the structure of open science and promote greater utilization of open services such as open educational resources (OERs), preprints, and other open methods that showcase scholarly communication across the sciences.

In the area of collection management, BIUST has recently joined the South African National Library and Information Consortium (SANLiC), and Gelfand will share her experience as a subject librarian working with the California Digital Library. BIUST’s goals include automating e-resource processing and management as it evolves into a more digital-based campus while exploring how AI can perform more routine functions in traditional library services.

In her project abstract, Gelfand noted that her goal is to create “a strong professional development program that centers around staff needs to meet ongoing challenges that academic libraries in somewhat isolated settings can benefit from as technology evolves, and within the realities of changing resource allocations. STEM librarianship is based on fundamentals of collaboration and evidence-based research, and the world shrinks when we realize libraries need to support science and technology globally.”

About the Fulbright US Scholar Program Award

Fulbright is a program of the US Department of State, with funding provided by the US federal government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program, which operates in more than 160 countries worldwide.

Since 1946, the Fulbright Program has provided more than 4000,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists and professionals of all backgrounds with the opportunity to study, teach, and conduct research abroad. Fulbright US Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators, and established professionals teaching or conducting research in affiliation with institutes abroad. Notable Fulbright recipients include 62 Nobel Laureates, 90 Pulitzer Prize winners, 82 MacArthur Fellows, 41 heads of state or government, and thousands of leaders across the private, public and nonprofit sectors.

For more information, visit the Fulbright Program webpage.