Douglas Waples (March 3, 1893—April 25, 1978)[1] was a pioneer of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School in the areas of print communication and reading behavior.

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.

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.

[1]: 148  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.

A modern view finds libraries as places where information is transferred, where reading materials are supplied to users, and where communities are constructed.

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.

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.” [13] 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.