Jeffrey Katzer

Jeffrey Katzer (1942 - March 4, 2000) was an American librarian who served as professor, associate dean, and dean at Syracuse University. Katzer was instrumental in establishing the undergraduate program in Information management and technology, the first such program nationwide, as well as raising Syracuse to national prominence in the field of library science. Katzer developed the Syracuse University Psychological Abstracts Retrieval Service (SUPARS), a pre-internet search engine consisting of over 35,000 individual items.

Life

Katzer graduated with a B.S. and M.A. from Pennsylvania State College. He received a Ph.D. in Communication, dissertation titled "A Theoretical Model of Human Language Processing", from Michigan State University in 1970.[1]

Katzer was married to his wife Linda, and they had two children, Andrew and Jill.

Contributions

Katzer joined the Syracuse University faculty in 1968, and after one year in the School of Education, joined the School of Library Service in 1969.[2] At Syracuse, Katzer spearheaded the formation of both the doctoral program in Information Science, and the undergraduate program in information management and technology--the first of its kind in the country. He served as Ph.D. program director and was twice appointed interim dean of the School of Information Studies. Katzer also served as a consultant to organizations including Southwestern Bell, the U.S. Department of State, and UNESCO.

His courses taught included statistics and research methods. His research examined leadership and change in organizations; the information behaviors of managers; and the effects of the Information Age on work, international competitiveness and society.[3] He presented the national teleworkshop "Research in School Library Media" with Dr. Michael B. Eisenberg to 41 sites in the U.S. and Canada on March 5, 1993.[4]

In 1969, Katzer and his colleague Pauline Atherton designed the Syracuse University Psychological Abstracts Retrieval Service (SUPARS). This project functioned as a proto-internet search engine, indexing 35,000 issues from the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Abstracts. SUPARS hardware consisted of a printing computer terminal connected to an IBM 360 mainframe. Two unique aspects (at the time) of SUPARS were the ability to search text within documents and the capacity to save previous searches. Among other sources, SUPARS received research funding from the U.S. Air Force.[5]

Katzer is the namesake of two awards bestowed annually at Syracuse University: the Jeffrey Katzer Undergraduate Professor of the Year Award and the Jeffrey Katzer Doctoral Student Advancement Fund. These honors recognize the professor and Ph.D. student who best exemplify the values and ideals of Katzer.[6]

Publications

• Katzer, J., Kenneth H. Cook, and Wayne W. Crouch. (1998). Evaluating Information: A Guide for Users of Social Science Research. 4th Edition. McGraw-Hill.
• Katzer, J. (1990). "Developing and maintaining interdisciplinary relationships". In J. M. Pemberton and A. E. Prentice (Eds.), Information Science: The Interdisciplinary Context (pp. 84-89). New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers.
• Katzer, J. and Moell, P. (1973). On the dimensionality of users' attitudes toward on-line retrieval systems—A replication?. JASIS 24 (4): 307-308. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.4630240414
• Katzer, J. (1972). The development of a semantic differential to assess users' attitudes towards an on-line interactive reference retrieval system. JASIS 23 (2): 122-128. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.4630230206
• Swope, M. J., & Katzer, J. (1972). The silent majority: Why don’t they ask questions? RQ 12(2): 161–166. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25825399

Awards

• ASIS Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award, 1992

Papers

• Katzer's books and papers were housed in display cases in the Jeffrey Katzer Collaboratory located in Hinds Hall at Syracuse University (2005): https://surface.syr.edu/ischool_newsletter/3/
• A few publications appear in the "Marta L. Dosa Papers" at Syracuse University Libraries: https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides_sua/html/sua_dosa_m.htm
• A publication appears in the "Alexander N. Charters Papers" at Syracuse University Libraries: https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/guides/c/charters_an.htm

Further Reading

• Von Dran, Raymond. "Jeffrey Katzer: Formal announcement". asist-archive.ischool.illinois.edu. 2000-03-05.[7]
• "Dissertation Information for Jeffrey Katzer". MPACT Database.[8]
• "Jeffrey Katzer". Wikipedia. 2026.[9]
• Westin, Monica. "The 1970s librarians who revolutionised the challenge of search". Aeon. 2023-06-05.[10]
• "What was SUPARS? Antecedent of Today's Search Explained". NISO Blog. 2023-08.[11]