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The GLS and Pierce Butler |
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I
still remember the excitement of reading Pierce Butler's Introduction to
Library Science (1933) for the first time in my master's program and
later, as a doctoral student at Indiana, realizing how profoundly the GLS
faculty at Chicago had changed our discipline from a bibliographically
oriented profession to one based on social science methodologies. Butler
initially supported a tripartite approach to creating a true library science
(i.e., by basing our problems on methodologies from history, sociology, and
psychology). Although at the end of his life, Butler had serious doubts about
the reductive scientistic approach. Finally, I find much of social
epistemology, as understood by Margaret Egan
and Jesse Shera
(LQ, 1952), to be a repackaging of Butler's thoughts and ideas about
the dissemination of knowledge. At
Indiana, David Kaser, one of the finest men I
know in our profession and now distinguished
professor emeritus, served as my dissertation adviser (and also
happened to be a line editor of it as well). For the Butler biography, I
traveled to Chicago, England, and Germany with extramural funding from the Newberry Library (Short-term
Summer Fellowship for Individual Research, 1982), the National
Endowment for the Humanities (Travel to Collections
Grant, 1984), and Beta Phi Mu's Harold Lancour
Scholarship for Foreign Study in 1986. In
1995, the University of Chicago Publications Board asked me to serve as
editor of The
Library Quarterly, which I did until 2003; now editor emeritus, I
continued to serve as a member of LQ's editorial board
until June 2008. Early archival material from 1931 to 1945 for the LQ
can be found in the University of Chicago's Special
Collections while later material from 1985 to 2003 can be found in
UCLA's Special
Collections (record number 4872189); my personal papers are in the
YRL Special Collections Stacks as Collection 586; a finding aid is in progress. PUBLICATIONS
I
hope that some of the inspirational and aspirational aspects of the GLS come
through in my own work: "History
of American Library Science: its Origins and Early Development," Encyclopedia
of Library and Information Science, edited by Mary N. Maack and Marcia
Bates (Francis and Taylor, 2010) (full text). "The
Library Quarterly Covers, 1931 - date" "Butler,
Pierce (1884-1953)," In American National Biography, vol. 4, pp.
98-99. Edited by John A. Garraty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. (full
text) The Gospel of Scholarship: Pierce Butler and A Critique of
American Librarianship. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. xv,
350pp. (reviews) "The
Cover: The Wing Foundation Bookplate," Libraries and Culture; the
Journal of Library History 26 (Fall 1991): 608-610. (full
text) "George
Alan Works (1877-1957): "Seeking Neither Fame Nor Fortune," Journal
of Library History 19 (Spring 1984): 298-304; reprint ed., Supplement
to the Dictionary of American Library Biography (Littleton, CO: Libraries
Unlimited, 1990): 166-168. "The
Cover: The Newberry Library Bookplate by Eric Gill," with Kuang-pei Tu. Journal
of Library History 22 (Winter 1987): 85-88. (full
text) "The
Cover: Pierce and Ruth Butler's Bookplate," with Amy Greenwood. Journal
of Library History 19 (Fall 1984): 541-544. (full
text) "Louis
Round Wilson and American University Librarianship." In Leaders in
American Academic Librarianship, pp. 372-399. Edited by Wayne A. Wiegand.
Beta Phi Mu Chapbook, No. 16. Pittsburgh, PA: Beta Phi Mu, 1983. The Spirit of Inquiry; the Graduate Library School at Chicago,
1921 - 1951. Foreword by Jesse
H. Shera. ACRL Publications in Librarianship, No. 42. Chicago:
American Library Association, 1982. xvi, 238pp. (reviews)
(PhD dissertation,
1978) "Douglas Waples:
A Biographical Sketch," Journal of Library History 15 (Winter
1980): 76-83; reprint ed., Supplement to the Dictionary of American
Library |
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