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".

Waples was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 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.

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