Gerald J. Sophar

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

Life

Gerald J. Sophar was born in 1917 in Brooklyn, NY. He attended City College of New York, learned photography, 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, Mr. 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. He worked for Documentation Inc. and Jonkers Termatrex, then joined the US Department of Agriculture, worked at the National Agriculture Library, and became an expert in copyright law.

He died on December 1, 2007 in Rockville, MD.

Contributions

Sophar worked at Documentation Inc. and for the Jonkers Termatrex Company. He did extensive work on the copyright revision bill in the 1970's. He authored a book on the famous Williams and Wilkins copyright case in 1970. He understood how organizations functioned and realized early that documentation was a social science. He helped settle editorial crises at American Documentation and brought it back under the control of ADI. He retired from the National Agricultural Library in 1984. During World War II he was a combat intelligence officer and an aerial photographer. After the war  he worked for the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Service in the displaced persons camps in Germany. He graduated from Georgetown University in the late 1940's.

An obituary on him in the Washington Post is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/07/AR2007120702284.html

View images of him from the ASIS photo gallery at: http://asis.org/gallery3/index.php/1975-Annual-Meeting-Boston-MA/Esther-Horne-and-Gerald-Sophar-1975

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]