Archief AFC128 - Andrew D. Osborne fonds

Andrew Delbridge Osborn was born on June 14, 1902 to Reverend Andrew Rule and Annie (née Delbridge) Osborn in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia. After completing a Bachelor of Arts (1923) and a Master of Arts (1925) at the University of Melbourne, Osborn moved to the United States and took a position in the cataloguing department of the New York Public Library. Osborn then completed a Doctorate of Philosophy (1934) at Columbia University, and a Master of Arts in Library Science (1935) at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Andrew Osborn married Beatrice Ladner Waite (b. 20 Apr. 1908). The couple had four children:
Susan Beatrice Osborn (b. 1936)
Andrew Waite Osborn (b. 1940)
Margaret Isabel Osborn (b. 1943)
Frank Delbridge Osborn (b. 1947)

Osborn worked at Harvard University from 1938 to 1958, eventually becoming the head of the cataloguing and serials departments. He next moved his family to Australia, taking a position as the head of the University of Sydney library. Returning to the United States in 1962, Osborn became a professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1966, Osborn accepted the position of Dean at the newly-founded School of Library and Information Science at the University of Western Ontario. In 1970, Osborn retired from Western and returned to Australia. His wife Beatrice died in 1977, and Osborn married Margaret Lundie, with whom he co-wrote a history of Australia's Commonwealth Parliamentary Library and the National Library of Australia.

Andrew Osborn wrote several well-known works on cataloguing, particularly The Crisis in Cataloguing (1941) and Serials Publications (1955). He was recognized with an honorary Doctorate of Letters at the University of Sydney in 1978, and admitted as a Member to the Order of Australia in 1987. Having moved back to Massachusetts at some point in his later years, Andrew Delbridge Osborn died on April 12, 1997.