Professor Wilfred Leonard Saunders CBE (18 April 1920- 27 July 2007) was a British librarian and the founding director of what became the University of Sheffield Information School.
[2] Early in World War II he was a radio operator with the British Expeditionary Force in France, and his diaries from this time were used as a source for the BBC documentary Dunkirk.
After the war he gained a degree in economics from the University of Cambridge, and was deputy librarian at the Institute of Bankers (1948-1949) before returning to Birmingham as the founding librarian at the University of Birmingham's Institute of Education (1949-1956).
[1] His 1989 Towards a unified professional organization for library and information science and services : a personal view, known as The Saunders Report, proposed that the Library Association and the Institute of Information Scientists should combine: this finally took place in 2002 with the establishment of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP).
[2][6] Saunders died 27 July 2007 and was survived by his wife Joan and their two sons.