Lee Pierce Butler

Who was Lee Pierce Butler?

Lee Pierce Butler was a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. He was one of the first to use the term "library science", 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 church history at Hartford Theological Seminary, 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 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 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 of the University of Chicago. It is for his work there defending the new techniques of quantitative social science to questions of librarianship that he is best known. His classic articulation of these ideas is his 1933 book, An Introduction to Library Science, the title of which introduced the idea of librarianship as a science. Among his best known students are Lester Asheim, Arna Bontemps, Rudolf Hirsch, Haynes McMullen, Jesse Shera, and Raynard Swank.