Douglas Waples - Biography

Biography

Waples earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Haverford College in 1914 and 1915 and a second master’s degree from Harvard University in 1917. After marrying Eleanor Jackson Cary and spending a year in France studying educational psychology, Waples returned to earn a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1920. His dissertation was entitled, “An Approach to the Synthetic Study of Interest in Education.” The Waples soon added three daughters to their family.

He served as assistant professor at Tufts College near Boston, and in 1923 Waples accepted a demanding tri-part role at the University of Pittsburgh as assistant dean of the graduate school, assistant professor of secondary education, and extension lecturer in a nearby steel mill town. Soon thereafter he followed his mentor, Werrett W. Charters, to the University of Chicago, where he accepted a position in the Education Department.

In 1926 with funds from the Carnegie Foundation, the Graduate School of Librarianship was formed with a mandate from Dean George Works to ponder library methodologies. This program was the first library school in the United States to offer a program of doctoral study. Waples then received an appointment as professor of educational method in this new School. He taught and published and, from 1929 to 1932, he served as acting dean four times. Waples identified six goals for the Graduate Library School: he saw a need to legitimize librarianship as a field for graduate research, to confirm a distinction between evidence and assumptions regarding values and methods of administration, to assure adequate training for aspiring public librarians, to meliorate library school instruction, to identify and systematize professional literature, and to promote scholarly publication.

Waples’s most influential work was People and Print (1937), one of four works published in the Studies in Library Science series. It redirected researchers from assumptions and personal beliefs to compelling investigations and quantitative and qualitative explorations. His revolutionary approach to “why people read; what people read; and how reading affects individuals, social groups, and social institutions” allowed a combination of a humanist’s interest in the betterment of society and the empiricist’s improve understanding of the formation and expansion of knowledge by individuals.

Another significant consideration for Waples was the social enterprise of libraries. He emphasized scholarship, management, professionalism, organization, and research. Investigating Library Problems (1939), another in the Studies in Library Science series, was a seminal work for the field of library and information studies because it, too, emphasized methodology and integrated quantitative research and introduced consideration of social epistemology. Here Waples went further and proposed that the methodologies and research outcomes were not as significant as the gathering of evidence on which decisions could be based in library environments.

In 1942 Waples joined the U.S. and traveled throughout Europe. In 1947 he and Eleanor Waples divorced, and, in the same year, he then married Dorothy Blake. He returned to the University of Chicago in 1948 but departed the Graduate Library School in 1950 to join the interdisciplinary Committee in Communication. In 1957 he retired from his academic post and retired in Washington Island, Wisconsin. In October 1960, a debilitating stroke affected his mobility and speech permanently, and, although he effected a partial recovery, personal communications revealed that his quality of life was affected dramatically. He died in 1978.