"A brilliant mind": Margaret Egan and social epistemology

Library Trends, Spring, 2004 by Jonathan Furner

In 1952 Shera was appointed dean of the School of Library Science at Western Reserve, where he established the CDCR in 1955. Egan was apparently instrumental in his deciding to leave Chicago for Cleveland. In a 1968 interview, Shera recalled:

   I went back to my office--at that time [the spring of 1952],
   Margaret Egan and I shared an office because of the shortage of
   space--and I was talking to her about it and she was sort of
   encouraging me to apply, and I said, "I don't know." And finally,
   after two or three days of talking ..., she just pushed the
   typewriter over and said, "Here, write, go ahead and write.
   Apply." And I said, "Okay, I'll go ahead and apply." (Shera 1968b)

Within a few years, Shera had brought Egan to join him in Cleveland; it was at that point that, as he remembered later in a 1970 interview, "we really thought we were going to get down to things" (Shera 1970b). The shock of Egan's death in 1959 affected Shera greatly: "I felt as just half of me had gone. How do I go on without this gal?" (Shera, 1968b). Shera retired as dean in 1970. He died on March 8, 1982, at the age of 78.

5. RESEARCH METHODS

In attempting to determine the nature and extent of Egan's intellectual influence on Shera, we can treat the idea of social epistemology as a kind of case study. But there are several difficulties inherent in conducting intellectual history of this kind. Suppose that we wished to gather evidence that would allow us either to press or to comfortably ignore the claim that it is Egan rather than Shera whom we should thank for originating the concept of social epistemology. On the one hand, we have Shera himself graciously deflecting the credit in Egan's direction. We also have what we may simply infer from the order of names in the statement of authorship attached to the LQ article. Shera and Egan coauthored eleven publications (see the appendix) and took care in three cases to specify Egan as the first (and, by implication, primary) author. On the other hand, we have the fact that it was Shera, not Egan, who revisited and developed the themes of the LQ article on multiple subsequent occasions. What methods do we have at our disposal that might provide further clues as to the nature and relative extent of the debt that library and information science (LIS) owes to Egan for her contribution to the discipline's theoretical foundations? I shall briefly discuss a few options that ultimately proved unproductive for the current study before moving on to describe a more fruitful approach.

5.1 Quantitative Analysis

One possibility would be to take a quantitative approach. Such an approach might involve, for instance, a citation analysis in which the citation "identity" (White, 2001) formed by the set of authors cited in publications authored by "Egan & Shera" is compared with the identities formed by the sets of authors cited in publications authored by "Shera & Egan," by Egan alone, and by Shera alone. If the "Egan & Shera" set were found to be most similar to the "Egan only" set, we might be led to conclude that the order of names in the statement of authorship accurately reflects the actual weight of contribution of the two individual authors to coauthored publications, or even (depending on the strength of similarity) that "Egan & Shera" articles should be treated more as "Egan only" articles than as truly jointly authored.