In the late 1960s and early 1970s, US university campuses saw a surge in information-retrieval studies that led to the development of digitised academic databases and catalogues that could be accessed online. Syracuse University was part of this wave with its Syracuse University Psychological Abstracts Retrieval Service (SUPARS) system, which allowed users to search a database of scholarly content via free text. Built by librarian Pauline Atherton in 1969 with funding from the Rome Air Development Center, SUPARS was the first system to allow free text searches directly in the documents themselves and to permit users to draw on previous searches. It was the forerunner to the many search engines and commercial library databases now used worldwide.
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