The other day I wrote about Wilfred Hughes’ hash table library. In the comments, Noonian Atall remarked that Nic Ferrier also has a key/value library (kv) that’s worth taking a looking at.
Whereas Hughes’ ht library is primarily concerned with hash tables, Ferrier’s kv library deals primarily with alists, although it does provide functions for converting between alists and hash tables. As with the ht library, kv provides some naming consistency and saves writing simple conversion and access functions. If you work a lot with alists, you should take a look at this library and see if it can save you some time and work.