Tefko Saracevic – simply known as “Tefko” in his field of study – has established a $100,000 endowed fund at the School of Communication and Information.
The Tefko Endowed Fund for Doctoral Student Support will be used to support top doctoral students focusing on library and information science. The fund is an investment that will generate interest and support student scholarships for many years to come.
“Rutgers was good to me. Over a long time, it provided me a great opportunity for research and teaching in collaboration with fine colleagues and students,” Tefko said. “I wish to contribute to an opportunity for others.”
Tefko’s contributions to the field of information science have been so influential that his colleagues at Rutgers held a conference in his honor for his 80th birthday.
A Rutgers faculty member from 1985 to 2010, Tefko was promoted to the highest academic rank at the university, Professor II, in 1991. Since his retirement from the full-time faculty he has been teaching online in the master of library and information science program.
Tefko's research focuses on information retrieval systems, human aspects of human-computer interaction, the evaluation of digital libraries, and analysis of Web queries as submitted to search engines. He is a visiting professor at four universities abroad.
A native of Croatia, Tefko studied electrical engineering at the University of Zagreb and completed his master (1962) and Ph.D. (1970) studies in information science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He now resides in Chicago.
