Ethel Louise Lyman

Ethel Louise Lyman (December 1, 1893 - November 17, 1974) was a music librarian and cataloger known for creating the music library at Indiana University—now called the William & Gayle Cook Music Library—as well as the collections of several important music libraries.

Career Lyman worked as a public librarian in Northampton, notably the Forbes Library which had an extensive music collection and classification scheme which was created under Charles Ammi Cutter. She was eventually promoted to the head of the Fine Arts Department where she oversaw all of the music and art collections. She resigned from the Forbes in 1922 in order to take a position as music librarian at Smith College, the college's first music librarian. While at Smith, during her library school periods, she worked at Harvard's Widener Library, the Boston Public Library, the Brookline Public Library, and the New England Conservatory of Music Library. She also taught library science principles to Smith College students who worked in the library. During her tenure, she revised the entire music catalog and ensured that all books and scores were completely cataloged. In 1936, she took a year off for a sabbatical and conducted a survey of some fifty-three music libraries in the eastern United States. She worked at Smith College until 1938 when she left to do research for a book, and possibly as the result of a personality conflict. At an SLA meeting in 1940, she was a strong advocate for the classification and cataloging of phonograph records in the 1940s and shared a classification system she had created for records at Smith College that was still in use in the 21st century, a system which focused on classifying the music, not just the physical item.

Personal life Lyman was born on December 1, 1893, the only child of Elias Cornelius Lyman, a baker, and Elizabeth Mary Smith Lyman. She endowed the Ethel Louise Lyman Memorial Fund at Indiana University to be used for acquiring of musical scores for the collection.