Margaret Elizabeth Egan (March 14, 1905 – January 26, 1959) was anAmericanlibrarian andcommunication scholar who is best known for “Foundations of a Theory in Bibliography,” published inLibrary Quarterly in 1952 and co-authored withJesse Hauk Shera. This article marked the first appearance of the term "social epistemology" in connection withlibrary science.^[1]

Margaret Egan was born inIndianapolis, Indiana, in 1905. She obtained a B.A. at theUniversity of Cincinnati in 1939 and completed graduate work at bothYale University (1940–41) and theUniversity of Chicago (1941–43). She worked at theCincinnati Public Library from 1933 to 1940; in 1943 Egan joined the Industrial Relations Center of theUniversity of Chicago as librarian and began teaching in theUniversity of Chicago Graduate Library School (GLS). She was appointed as an assistant professor in the GLS in 1946 and was an associate editor ofLibrary Quarterly from 1952 to 1955. She left Chicago in 1955 and joinedJesse Shera at theSchool of Library Science atWestern Reserve University inCleveland, Ohio, where she first served as a research associate at the newly formed Center for Documentation and Communication Research. In 1956 she was appointed as an associate professor.

Egan died of a heart attack in 1959 at the age of 53.

Social epistemology, “the production, distribution, and utilization of intellectual products” (Egan and Shera 1952), correlates the production and consumption of information to that of material goods. Shera later wrote that socialepistemology “is the study of knowledge in society,” distinct from previous investigations of individualknowledge.

Furner (2004) lists the following contributions made in “Foundations of a Theory of Bibliography”:

• Establishing “informed social action” as the goal of library service.
• Establishing the extent to which librarianship contributes to attaining this goal as “the primary criterion by which [bibliographic services] may be evaluated.”
• Providing “a theoretical framework … for the study ofinformation-seeking behavior, knowledge organization, andbibliometrics”, which is then treated as “a theoretical foundation forlibrary andinformation science.”
• Using the term “social epistemology” in this context for the first time.

Although Egan was the first author on “Foundations of a Theory of Bibliography,” her untimely death (and Shera’s prolific publishing that followed) have led to frequent omissions of her name when citing the work. In 1978, Shera wrote that "both the term and the concept [of social epistemology] were hers, but because I have given it wide currency, despite frequent disclaimers, it has generally been attributed to me.”^[2]

• Dick, Archie L. 2002. “Social Epistemology, Information Science and Ideology.”Social Epistemology 16(1): 23-35.
• Egan, Margaret E., and Jesse H. Shera. 1952. “Foundations of a Theory of Bibliography.”Library Quarterly 22(2):125-137.
• Furner, Jonathan. 2004. “‘A Brilliant Mind’: Margaret Egan and Social Epistemology.”Library Trends 52(4):792-809.

• 1905 births
• 1959 deaths
• 20th-century American essayists
• 20th-century American philosophers
• 20th-century American women writers
• University of Chicago faculty
• 20th-century American librarians
• American women essayists
• 20th-century American women librarians
• American women philosophers
• Bibliometricians
• American epistemologists
• People from Indianapolis
• American philosophers of education
• American philosophers of social science
• Social epistemologists
• University of Cincinnati alumni
• Case Western Reserve University faculty
• Librarians from Indiana

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata