Allison, Austin Lamar, 1989-

Austin Allison is a cataloging and metadata librarian at the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University. His main work focus is newspaper digitization, bibliographic description, cataloging, and metadata. He serves as an associate director of the West Texas Historical Association and as board chair of the Texas Plains Trail Region.

His research concerns land, survey, water, and settlement in the American West. His work has appeared in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, the Journal of the West, and the Panhandle-Plains Historical Review. He has written feature articles for the Caprock Chronicles column in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and the heritage tourism magazine Authentic Texas.

He photographs the same country he writes about. The plates are issued as visual monographs: American Escarpments and Water on the Llano Estacado, with Cotton Gins of Texas in preparation.

I am a cataloging and metadata librarian, a historian, and a photographer of the American West. The work on this site is my own: I wrote the articles, took the photographs, and built the site.

I was born in Lubbock, Texas. I lived the first eleven years of my life in the small town of Muleshoe, which is just east of the Texas–New Mexico border. In July 2001, my family moved to Des Moines, Iowa, and we lived there through my middle school years until March 2004. I attended Waukee Middle School. From there we moved to Spokane, Washington, where I finished high school at Central Valley High School in June 2008.

I decided to attend Texas Tech University in January 2008 so that I could be closer to somewhere I considered home. My grandmother still lived in Muleshoe, and I always had a unique and close relationship with her that drew me back to Texas. She is one of the main reasons I love history, government, and politics. She was one of the original founders of the Muleshoe Heritage Center and Foundation in the mid-1980s. Students in her high school government classes organized an effort to save the Muleshoe Santa Fe Depot, and she sponsored the early work to save that structure in 1985. Twenty years later, I remember her telling me about a new effort to save the Virginia City Hotel. The story of that venture is what eventually sent me into researching Virginia City and the early settlement of Bailey County.

I started classes at Texas Tech in August 2008. The college experience was completely foreign to me. I was not a typical student; I would much rather have spent my spare time in Muleshoe visiting my grandmother than participating in the usual college activities. I came to Texas Tech as a student interested in Ancient Greek and Roman history, and I took twelve hours of Ancient Greek. Midway between my sophomore and junior years, in June 2010, I was hired at the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library as a student assistant at the reference desk. Little did I know I would still be working there more than fifteen years later.

Working with rare and historically significant records from West Texas and the American Southwest generated an enduring interest in pursuing librarianship as a career. After so many years, I still turn up items I have the privilege of describing for the next person who comes looking.

I am nothing without the love and affection of my wife, Jaymie. We were married in March 2025. Having her in my life has been the biggest positive change in it.