Achleitner wins second Fulbright

Under his second Fulbright Senior Specialists grant, Herbert Achleitner, a professor in the School of Library and Information Management, will soon be sent to Serbia and Montenegro

In the fall of 2001, Achleitner was a visiting professor at the University of Sofia, Department of Library and Information Science, on his first Fulbright Senior Specialist grant. This September, he will travel to the University of Belgrade where he will lecture on Information Entrepreneurship.

“I see my role as opening the door for them to think of information as a commodity,” said Achleitner. “There is a great desire if the international community to reconnect the Serbian society with the Western society and Western values. This is part of the effort of establishing networks between Serbian university people and Western university faculty to form partnerships to introduce the latest thoughts, techniques and ideas to their university community.”
Created to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program which was started in 1946, the Senior Specialists Program aims at increasing the number of faculty and professionals who have the opportunity to go abroad on a Fulbright.
Instead of taking place for an entire academic year as the traditional Fulbright Scholar program is set up, the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program offers two- to six-week grants to leading U.S. academics and professionals to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at academic institutions around the world.
The Fulbright Senior Specialist Program also differs from the traditional Fulbright Scholar competition in that the Council for International Exchange of Scholars builds rosters of specialists in a variety of fields through an open application process. Applicants recommended by specialist peer review committees and approved by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board become candidates for Fulbright Senior Specialist awards. As countries request Fulbright Senior Specialists through their local Fulbright Commission or U.S. diplomatic post, candidates are matched with appropriate programs. In the case of Achleitner, the University of Belgrade specifically asked for him.
Achleitner first came into contact with the University of Belgrade when the director of their library school came to the Sofia 2002, the international library science conference that is sponsored by ESU’s SLIM and the University of Sophia’s Department of Library Sciences. Then last year, Achleitner presented a paper at a conference hosted by the University of Belgrade’s library school.

“First coming out of a communistic experience and then becoming isolated because of political unrest that existed in Yugoslavia, there is a great desire of the scholarly community to reconnect with the West,” said Achleitner. “Education is a critical element to developing a modern society – especially in the case of Serbia.”

The country of Serbia and Montenegro has just recently reemerged as part of the global community after a long history of isolation. After World War II, the country of Yugoslavia was under the control of Tito. Although his government was of a Communist nature, it steered its own path between the Warsaw Pact nations and the West for four and a half decades.

In the early 1990s, Yugoslavia then began to unravel along ethnic lines with Slovenia, Croatia, the Former Yugoslavia Republic of Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina being recognized as independent states. The remaining republics of Serbia and Montenegro were declared as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with Milosevic in control. The massive expulsions and proof of civilian massacres of ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo provoked an international response, which included the NATO bombing of Serbia and the stationing of NATO, Russian and other peacekeepers in Kosovo.

Federal elections in the fall of 2000 brought about the end of Milosevic rule of the country. In 2001, the country's suspension was lifted, and it was once more accepted into UN organizations under the name of Yugoslavia. In February 2003, the name of the country was officially changed to Serbia and Montenegro.

“The fighting cut Serbia off economically and certainly in terms of information,” said Achleitner. “When Milosevic cracked down on the university, he fired a lot of the faculty and closed some of the universities. The librarians played a very critical role by becoming virtual librarians, going out to the Internet, pulling in information from the West and distributing it.”

While at the University of Belgrade, Achleitner will also work with one of his Serbian colleagues to analyze information infrastructure of Serbia including the publishing, the research and the distribution of information. He then plans to write an article of the Serbian infrastructure as it is and where they are moving and what kind of information policies the government is discussing to put in place.

In addition to his teaching courses on the global information infrastructure, international information policy, knowledge and society, and information brokering at ESU’s SLIM, Achleitner has worked as a consultant for the US Information Agency in Paraguay and Poland and the World Bank in Paraguay. He also has served as a consultant on the Chief of Staff US Army Training and Leader Development Executive Panel for two years. He has organized a series of international conferences in Kansas City, KS; Warsaw, Poland; and Sofia, Bulgaria.

Last Updated July 2, 2007>