Gerald J. Sophar

Gerald J. Sophar (1917-2007) was an American information scientist.

Life

Gerald Jack Sophar was born in 1917 in Brooklyn, NY. He attended City College of New York, learned photography, and enlisted in the Army shortly after the outbreak of World War II. He was a combat intelligence officer and later an aerial photography officer in the Army Air Forces.

After the war, Sophar worked for the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the displaced persons camps in occupied Germany, was chief of police in the Regensburg area, and helped separate former Nazis from other refugees. He became an expert witness for US Department of Justice prosecutors bringing cases against Nazis wrongly admitted to the United States. Sophar returned to the United States in the late 1940s, graduated from Georgetown University, then worked for the State Department in its displaced persons commission in West Germany until 1952.

In 1952 Sophar co-founded Documentation Inc. with Mortimer Taube and others. He also worked for Jonkers Business Machines. He was executive director of the Committee to Investigate Copyright Problems Affecting Communications in Science and Education, Inc. and in 1956 became Washington representative for the Institute for Scientific Information.

Sophar joined the US Department of Agriculture, worked at the National Agriculture Library, and became an expert in copyright law. He was Administrator for Federal/Local Community Information Programs, at the National Advisory Commission on Libraries, from 1980. He retired in 1984 and died on December 1, 2007 in Rockville, MD.

Contributions

Sophar played a significant role in the orderly development of American Documentation Institute. He did extensive work on the copyright revision bill in the 1970's.

Publications

• "Micro-opaques." Special libraries 51, no 2 (Feb 1960): 59-62.
• "Nature of the Problem." With L. H. Lowell. In: Reprography and Copyright law. Ed. by Lowell H. Hattery and George P. Bush. [Washington, DC]: [American Institute of Biological Sciences], 1964.
• "'Termatrex' as a tool for storing and searching indexes." Modern Uses of Logic in Law 5, no 2 (Jume 1964): 1-12. Case study: Use of Jonker Termatrex optical discovery system for law searching.
• The Determination of Legal Facts and Economic Guideposts with Respect to the Dissemination of Scientific and Educational Information as it is Affected by Copyright--a Status Report. Final Report. With Laurence B. Heilprin. Washington, US Office of Education, Bureau of Research, 1967. ED 014 621. See also American Documentation 19, no 3 (July 1968): p.317-321.
• "Page Charges and Copyright Infringements." With David Lester. Science 163, no 3866 (Jan 1969): 423-423
• "Vestigiality of fair use." IEEE transactions on professional communication PC-18, no 3 (Sept 1975): 220-221.

Offices

• American Documentation Institute. President, 1961.

Awards

• American Society for Information Science. Watson Davis Award, 1976.

Further reading

• Sullivan, Patricia. "Gerald J. Sophar, 90; Witness In Nazi Deportation Cases." Obituary. Washington Post, Dec 7, 2007. [1]
• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.