Jesse Shera

Jesse Hauk Shera (1903–1982) was an American librarian and library science educator noted for shaping modern thinking about documentation and the intellectual foundations of librarianship. He taught at the University of Chicago’s Graduate Library School and later served at Western Reserve University, where he helped develop influential programs in library education. Shera wrote widely on the history and philosophy of librarianship and argued that libraries should be studied in relation to how societies create, organize, and use knowledge. He is especially associated with “social epistemology,” a term he promoted to describe the social processes that underlie knowledge production and communication.