Provided by Wikipedia 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".
