 His ideas of the 1930s went against the humanistic, literary approach to librarianship (the "scholar librarian" of old) as well as the technical, procedure-based approach of "library economy" (the common term for library science of the time).The significant aspects of the GLS approach were that it employed quantitative, scientific research methods, and that it aimed to examine librarianship as a social system of communication.Librarianship, according to Butler's new definition, was the "transmission of the accumulated experience of society through the instrumentality of the book."