Ethel Louise Lyman and the Beginnings of the Indiana University Music Library

This paper traces the life and work of Ethel Louise Lyman--her time at Indiana University (IU), and prior to that, her years at Smith College, and at Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts. It also looks at the early history of the Indiana University Music Library (since 1996, the William & Gayle Cook Music Library), before Lyman's appointment. With the exception of the biographies of such library luminaries as Charles Ammi Cutter or Melvil Dewey, little has been written about the lives of early American librarians, and especially the lives of women librarians, of whom few were administrators, and consequently not well remembered.