Allyson Carlyle

Allyson Carlyle (February 1954 – April 4, 2020) was a United States of America library and information science scholar, considered a leading scholar in the field of cataloging.[1]

Carlyle was one of the initial faculty members of the University of Washington Information School, and served as the school’s first Associate Dean for Academics under Dean Michael Eisenberg.[2] Carlyle worked to increase the diversity of the library profession, and established the Sherman Alexie and Lethene Parks Endowed Fellowship in Tribal and Rural Librarianship at the iSchool.[1]

She was known for innovative cataloging research that focused on how users would find items, not just how librarians would organize them.[1] In 1998 she was the recipient of the Jesse H. Shera Award for Excellence in Published Research for her article Fulfilling the Second Objective in the Online Catalog: Schemes for Organizing Author and Work Records into Usable Displays.[3] She joined the editorial board of The Library Quarterly in 2009.[4] She also won the OCLC/ALISE Research Paper Award in 2000, for Developing Organized Information Displays for Voluminous Works: A Study of User Clustering Behavior.[4] She retired from the iSchool in 2018 but continued to teach cataloging there.[5] An issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly was a dedicated festschrift to her.[5]

Carlyle was born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in Montana.[1] She earned her MLS and Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994.[1] She served with the Peace Corps in Africa. Her longtime partner was Lisa Fusco.[1]