Margaret Egan

Margaret Egan (1905-1959) was an American scholar and librarian.

Margaret Egan was born March 14, 1905 in Indianapolis.

Life

Egan studied at Barnard College and completed a bachelor's degree at the University of Cincinnati in 1930. She trained as a librarian at the Cincinnati Public Library where she worked as a readers' advisor 1933-1940. She studied political science at Yale University, then completed all the requirements for a PhD in library science at the University of Chicago, except for the dissertation.

Egan taught at the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago (1946–55) and at the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (1955–59).

She died in 1959.

Contributions

Social epistemology

With her colleague Jesse Shera, Egan wrote "Foundations of a Theory of Bibliography" for the Library Quarterly in 1952. This article marked the first appearance of the term "social epistemology." Shera, who is widely associated with social epistemology, explicitly attributed both the term and the concept to Egan (Shera (1978, 159).

Egan and Shera propose social epistemology as a theoretical framework for the study of the production, distribution, and utilization of intellectual products. In no existing field had scholars attempted to study cognitive behavior at the social level, despite the primary importance of the cognitive mode in determining the structure of society The object of study of the cognitive mode is the process by which the actor attempts to know the particular situation in which the action takes place. They thus define social epistemology as “the study of those processes by which society as a whole seeks to achieve a perceptive or understanding relation to the total environment” (Egan & Shera, 1952, p. 132).

Publications

Furner (2004, Appendix, pp 803-807) is a bibliography of Egan's published works. [1]

• "Foundations of a Theory of Bibliography." Library Quarterly 22, no 2 (1952): 125–137. With J. H. Shera.
• Shera, J. H. & Egan, M. E. (1953). "A review of the present state of librarianship and documentation." In S. C. Bradford, Documentation 2nd ed., London: Crosby Lockwood, pp 11–45.

Further reading

• Shera, J. H. "Egan, Margaret Elizabeth (1905-1959)" Dictionary of American library biography, ed. by Bohdan S. Wynar. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1978, pp 158-159.
• Furner, Jonathan. "'A brilliant mind': Margaret Egan and social epistemology." Library Trends 52, no 4 (Spring 2004): 792-809. [2]