Douglas Waples - Social Epistemology Foundation

Social Epistemology Foundation

A modern view finds libraries as places where information is transferred, where reading materials are supplied to users, and where communities are constructed. Similarly, Waples presented knowledge as interdisciplinary and social in all aspects of his revolutionary perspective of library studies. The most productive era of investigation and writing was in the 1930s, when scholars like Waples interjected social science research methodology. Focus on technical skills was forced to the background, and, with funding from donors like the Carnegie Foundation, advanced research and education in librarianship as well as emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to other professions and academic disciplines altered scholarly and professional perspective. Increased attention was directed to reading behavior, and the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago became the hub of the developing interest in the study of reading at the time when the Chicago School of Sociology was developing under the influences of significant philosophers like John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Frederic Thrasher.

Those who collaborated with Waples, his peers and his graduate students, helped develop the sociological outlook from which scholars assumed a stance of social scientists and gathered statistics about reading materials and related locations frequented by the public. In 1953 Jesse Shera echoed these sentiments in a published paper: “Librarianship is becoming a cluster of inter-dependent specialisms within a scholarship that is unitary and all persuasive, and that it is supported by a body of professional knowledge.”