Lee Pierce Butler (December 19, 1884 – March 28, 1953) was a professor at the

University of Chicago Graduate Library School The University of Chicago Graduate Library School (GLS) was established in 1928 to develop a program for the graduate education of librarians with a focus on research. Housed for a time in the Joseph Regenstein Library, the GLS closed in 1989. GLS ...

. He was one of the first to use the term "

library science Library science (often termed library studies, bibliothecography, and library economy) is an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, an ...

" (along with S. R. Ranganathan), by which he meant the scientific study of books and users, and was a leader in the new social-scientific approach to the field in the 1930s and 1940s. Butler was born in Clarendon Hills, Illinois. A middling student at first, he earned a Ph.B in 1906 and an M.A. in Latin in 1910 from Dickinson College. He went on to study

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...

church history __NOTOC__ Church history or ecclesiastical history as an academic discipline studies the history of Christianity and the way the Christian Church has developed since its inception. Henry Melvill Gwatkin defined church history as "the spiritua ...

Hartford Theological Seminary The Hartford International University for Religion and Peace (formerly Hartford Seminary) is a private theological university in Hartford, Connecticut. History Hartford Seminary's origins date back to 1833 when the Pastoral Union of Connectic ...

, earning a B.D. in 1910 for "Napoleon's Attitude to Christianity and to the Roman Catholic Church" and his Ph.D. in 1912 for "Studies on the Christology of Irenaeus." He failed in parish life, but found himself a bit later. Butler worked at the Newberry Library in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

from 1916 to 1919, and went on to lead its John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing. In that position he built the collection of the Newberry into one of the great

research libraries A research library is a library which contains an in-depth collection of material on one or several subjects.(Young, 1983; p. 188) A research library will generally include an in-depth selection of materials on a particular topic or set of to ...

for international scholarship in the United States, through extensive international travel to acquire hard-to-find books. In 1931, Butler became a professor of bibliographic history at the Graduate Library School (GLS) of the University of Chicago (the same year that ''

The Library Quarterly ''The Library Quarterly'' is a quarterly double-anonymous peer-reviewed academic journal covering library science, including historical, sociological, statistical, bibliographical, managerial, psychological, and educational aspects of the fiel ...

'' was founded there). It is for his work there defending the new techniques of

quantitative Quantitative may refer to: * Quantitative research, scientific investigation of quantitative properties * Quantitative analysis (disambiguation) * Quantitative verse, a metrical system in poetry * Statistics, also known as quantitative analysis ...

social science to questions of

librarianship Library science (often termed library studies, bibliothecography, and library economy) is an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, and ...

that he is best known. His classic articulation of these ideas is his 1933 book, ''An Introduction to Library Science'' (University of Chicago Press), the title of which introduced the idea of librarianship as a science. Among his best known students are

Lester Asheim Lester Eugene Asheim (January 22, 1914 – July 1, 1997) was an American librarian and scholar of library science. He was on the faculty of the University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina and held positions in the American Li ...

, Arna Bontemps, Rudolf Hirsch, Haynes McMullen,

Jesse Shera Jesse Hauk Shera (December 8, 1903 – March 8, 1982) was an American librarian and information scientist who pioneered the use of information technology in libraries and played a role in the expansion of its use in other areas throughout the ...

, and Raynard Swank. His ideas of the 1930s went against the humanistic,

literary Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

approach to librarianship (the "scholar librarian" of old) as well as the technical, procedure-based approach of "library economy" (the common term for library science of the time). The significant aspects of the GLS approach were that it employed quantitative, scientific research methods, and that it aimed to examine librarianship as a social system of

communication Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inqui ...

. Librarianship, according to Butler's new definition, was the "transmission of the accumulated experience of society through the instrumentality of the book." Thus, the problems his new "library science" was intended to address were social problems of information exchange and communication in society, where library economy had been confined to addressing the practical problems of the administration of libraries. While not everyone welcomed Butler's new approach, most especially C. Seymour Thompson, it has had a permanent influence on the research agenda of the field, and the new term "library science" became the generally adopted name for the academic study of librarianship. Late in his career, Butler recanted aspects of the GLS's scientific approach, finding it too quantitative and scientistic, and began to argue for a more humanistic or even spiritual approach. Indeed, "Librarianship had, in fact, been replaced by a pseudo-science, in Butler's opinion. Ideas were supplanted by facts, or even worse, by mere data. The field risked becoming truly anti-intellectual, lost in 'the simplicity of its pragmatism.'"John V. Richardson Jr., ''The Gospel of Scholarship: Pierce Butler and A Critique of American Librarianship''. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press (1992), p. 131.

References

External links

John V. Richardson Jr., The Gospel of Scholarship: Pierce Butler and A Critique of American Librarianship. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992 is the standard book-length biographical work on Pierce Butler

{{DEFAULTSORT:Butler, Lee Pierce 1884 births 1953 deaths American librarians Hartford Seminary alumni People from Clarendon Hills, Illinois University of Chicago faculty Library science scholars