Tefko Saracevic

Tefko Saracevicwas born in Zagreb, Croatia, November 24, 1930 and died Spring Lake, Michigan, on October 5, 2024. He migrated to the USA and became a leading information scientist, known for his with information retrieval, digital libraries, and, especially, the notion of relevance.

Career

Saracevic 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. In 1959 he arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, where he began working at the Center for Communication and Documentation Research at Case Western Reserve University and obtained his master's and doctorate degrees in information science. His doctoral dissertation completed in 1970 was entitled “On the Concept of Relevance in Information Science,” a topic to which he repeatedly returned. He was a professor in the School of Information Science at Case Western Reserve from 1962 until he moved to became a professor at 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 as an emeritus professor 2010. After the end of Yugoslavia, he contributed actively to the development of information science in independent Croatia where he He co-founded the international conference Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA).

Works

• Editor-in-Chief, Information Processing & Management, 1985-2008.
• President. American Society for Information Science and Technology, 1985-2008.

Publications (selected)

• Introduction to Information Science. New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1970.
• "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.

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.

Honors

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

Durther reading

• "Tefko Saracevic" Wikipedia [1]
• "Tefko Saracevic Obituary" Legacy [2]