Douglas Waples
American librarian (1893–1978)
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. 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Douglas Waples” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.