Douglas Waples

Douglas Waples (March 3, 1893 – April 25, 1978) was a pioneer of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School in the areas of print communication and reading behavior. Waples authored one of the first books on library research methodology, a work directed at students supervised through correspondence courses. Jesse Shera credits Waples’s scholarly research into the social effects of reading as the foundation for the approaches to the study of knowledge known as social epistemology. In 1999, American Libraries named him one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".

Biography

Waples was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 1937 Waples participated in the World Congress of Universal Documentation with Herman Fussler and Watson Davis, head of the American delegation.

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 August 1941 the Graduate Library School of University of Chicago presented a conference on mass communications and American democracy. Waples reported on the 14 papers addressing the issues pertinent just before declaration of war.

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. He died in 1978.

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.”

University of Chicago Graduate Library School Records

University of Chicago Press records (1892-1965) are held at the University of Chicago Library Special Collections Research Center, including meeting minutes and faculty files, restricted until 2009, and scholarly publications, restricted until 2029. Files on monographs comprise the largest part of the collection. The following Waples publications are included:

Classroom Procedure Test in English Composition (1928), Classroom Procedure Test in Natural Science (1928), Problem Exercises for High-School Teachers (1928), The Commonwealth Teacher-Training Study (1929), What People Want to Read About (1931), The Library (1936), National Libraries and Foreign Scholarship (1936), People and Print (1937), Investigating Library Problems (1939), Libraries and Readers in the State of New York (1939), What Reading Does to People (1940), and Print, Radio, and Film in a Democracy (1942).

Many of Waples’s papers from his tenure at the Graduate Library School were destroyed in a fire in 1961 at his Bel Air, California, home. The remaining papers held outside University of Chicago Library Special Collections Research Center are in the possession of Mrs. Dorothy Waples and the Graduate Library School.