The first discipline called “social epistemology” was information science, as envisaged by the University of Chicago librarian, Jesse Shera, in the 1960s. According to Shera, social epistemology applied social scientific knowledge to synthesize the theoretical and practical functions of librarianship. It married a universal classification system to what, after the cognitive scientist Donald Norman, is called a “smart environment” for browsing that would enable library users to cultivate their epistemic interests and make educated choices with minimum friction. Nowadays we might say that Shera's image of the information scientist was that of a “mindscape designer”. Shera introduced social epistemology at a time when computers had begun to enhance librarians' capacities in the search and retrieval of information. However, Shera did not want the emerging field of information science to become captive to the new technology, which would only lead to the deprofessionalization and perhaps even the redundancy of librarians. Instead, he urged librarians to regard documents as sites for studying the multiply embedded social relationships among producers, consumers and objects of knowledge.

Shera was fighting an uphill battle that has been largely lost, as librarians have shifted their focus from the construction and maintenance of “holdings” (i.e. the documents contained in the library) to a user-friendly conception of access to such holdings. Accordingly, information science research has gravitated towards the design of indicators that do little more than summarize spontaneous patterns of citation and usage.