SLIS 25th Anniversary Display Page 24

SLIS 25th Anniversary Display Page 24

MLIS
SLIS

An article about the retirement of Andrew Osborn, the first dean of SLIS, and a photo of a retirement cake decorated to look like a book given to Dr. Osborn by the students of SLIS.

Unknown

FIMS Graduate Library

Winter 1992

TIFF

English

Page 24_Display.tif

1970-06-26—1970-06-30

SLIS 25th Anniversary Display

SLIS Building

Dr. Andrew Delbridge Osborn, founder and first Dean of Western’s School of Library and Information Science retired on June 30, 1970. It was remarkable that the University of Western Ontario was able to attract a librarian of the stature of Dr. Osborn. He had played such a vital role in shaping so many of the advances in librarianship in North America. He had been associated with great libraries such as the New York Public and Harvard during important periods of expansion. He had already influenced a generation of librarians through his teaching at the library schools at the Universities of Michigan, Southern California, Columbia, Pittsburgh, and others. He experimented in building a library school which would conform to his dream of making library education a truly graduate discipline. He gathered remarkable library resources, developed and launched an experimental computer-based classification scheme, and provided for excellent technical resources, bindery, printing and audio-visual equipment. Perhaps the accomplishment which will have the greatest influence of all is his demonstration of the validity and vitality of the seminar method as a mode of instruction in graduate library education.

Dr. Osborn was honoured on his retirement at a luncheon held during a two-day meeting of the Association of American Library Schools at U.W.O. on June 26-27, 1970.

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