Tefko Saracevic

Tefko Saracevic (1930-2024) was a Croatian American information scientist.

Life

Tefko Saracevic was born on November 24, 1930 in Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Zagreb in 1957 and soon afterwards secretly hiked across the mountains into southern Austria as a refugee. In 1959 he arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked at the Center for Communication and Documentation Research at Case Western Reserve University working with James Whitney Perry, Allen Kent, and their Semantic Factor indexing language. He obtained his master's and doctorate degrees in information science there. His doctoral dissertation completed in 1970 was entitled “On the Concept of Relevance in Information Science,” a topic to which he repeatedly returned.

Saracevic was a professor in the School of Information Science at Case Western Reserve from 1962 until he moved to the School for Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1985. He became an emeritus professor in 2020 and remained academically active. After the end of Yugoslavia, he contributed actively to the development of information science in independent Croatia where he co-founded the international conference Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA). He died on October 5, 2024 in Spring Lake, Michigan.

Contributions

Saracevic became a leading information scientist, known for his work on information retrieval, digital libraries, and, especially, the notion of relevance.

Editor-in-Chief, Information Processing & Management, 1985-2008.

Publications

Some of Saracevic's numerous publications have been heavily cited. Google Scholar [1] and the Wikipedia [2] list several.

Introduction to Information Science. New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1970. Edited volume.
"Relevance: A Review and a framework." Journal of the Association for Information Science 26, no. 6 (Nov-Dec 1975): 321-343. "Relevance: A Review of the literature and a framework for thinking on the notion in information science. Part II: Nature and manifestations of relevance." 58, no 13 (2007): 1915-1933.
"Progress in documentation: Perception of the needs for scientific and technical information in less developed countries." Journal of documentation 36, no. 3 (1980): 214-267.
"Relevance reconsidered." In: Proceedings of the second conference on conceptions of library and information science (CoLIS 2, 1996). Ed: P. Ingwersen, N. O. Pors. Copenhagen: Royal School of Librarianship, 1996, pp 201-218.
"Real life information retrieval: A study of user queries on the web." With others. ACM SIGIR Forum 32, no 1 (1998): 5-17.
"Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web." With Bernard J. Jansen & Amanda Spink. Information processing & management 36, no. 2 (2000): 207-227.
"Searching the web: The public and their queries." With others. Journal of the American society for information science and technology 52, no. 3 (2001): 226-234.
"Part III: Nature and manifestations of relevance." 58, no. 13 (2007): 2126–2144.
The Notion of Relevance in Information Science : Everybody Knows What Relevance Is. But, What Is It Really? Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017.

Offices

{{ASIST|American Society for Information Science and Technology]]. President, 1991.

Honors

American Association for Information Sciences and Technology. Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award, 1985; Best Paper Award, 1989; and Award of Merit, 1995.
Association for Computing Machinery. Gerald Salton Award for Scientific Excellence,, 1997.
University of Zadar, Croatia. Honorary doctorate of science, 2011.

Life

Contributions

Publications

Offices

Honors

Further reading