Imagining information retrieval in the library: Desk Set in historical context

In 1957, the romantic comedy Desk Set showedin movie theaters across the US. KatharineHepburn starred as a research librarian at abroadcasting network and Spencer Tracy as anengineer who installs a computer (“Emmy”) inthe corporation’s research department library.The script, written by Phoebe and HenryEphron and based on the earlier play byWilliam Marchant, was prophetic in its depic-tion of automated information retrieval by anelectronic computer capable of storing the con-tents of an entire library, processing natural-language input, and prompting users toformulate more precise queries.

Viewed in the late 1950s, amidst publicityabout the capabilities of “giant brains” and“thinking machines,” as scientists, engineers,and the media called them, the film suggestedthat computers were sources not of amazementbut of amusement. The script undermined thenotion that a computer could think through avariety of scenes suggesting that thinkingrequires human bodies and human memories.In addition to poking fun at computers and theanxiety they invoked in some people, thescript’s subtext foretold the union of libraryand information science, an eventuality that tomany librarians and documentalists (or infor-mation scientists) in the 1950s seemed asimplausible as a thinking machine. Because ofits futuristic insight, its dissident wit, and itsfeminist implications, the film continues toappeal to some segments of today’s mass audi-ence when it airs on cable television and isrented from video outlets.1 Not surprisingly, itcontinues to appeal to information workers,particularly professional librarians and libraryand information science (LIS) students andeducators. But many outside the LIS field per-sist in their enjoyment of the comedy, for the

play from which the film was derived contin-ues to be revived, sometimes with updated revi-sions, at little theaters across the country. DeskSet has a life beyond its original performanceson stage and screen, with references to itappearing in a variety of genres.2 (For furtherbackground on Desk Set, see the brief sidebarthat accompanies this article at http://comput-er.org/annals/an2002/a3toc.htm.)

Desk Set’s ability to continue to resonate withaudiences some 50 years after its introductionsuggests that the film can serve as a primarysource in a historical study of information stor-age and retrieval. Yet because it is an artifact ofpopular culture rather than a document gener-ated in the course of designing systems or ofconducting business, the film falls outside thecategory of traditional primary materials for thestudy of history. Although it is fiction, in whichthe characters, computers, and corporate libraryare imaginary, it nevertheless can attest to theways in which computers were perceived dur-ing the decade when they first became availablefor business (not just military and governmen-tal) applications and open to public view via themass media.

When Desk Set appeared in 1957, it apparent-ly was the lone film to offer a vision of the futureof computing outside the realm of science fic-tion.3 The script dealt with two key phenome-na—computers deployed to automate a varietyof business processes and educated professionalwomen committed to their careers—whose con-sequences were still unknown in the middle ofthe 20th century. In its treatment of informationtechnology and its consideration of the gendereddivision of labor in the communication andinformation industries, it suggests how popularculture of the 1950s both mediated and reflect-ed knowledge about computerization and its

14 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1058-6180/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE

Imagining Information Retrieval in theLibrary: Desk Set in Historical ContextCheryl Knott MaloneUniversity of Arizona

In the 1950s, a computer that could hold the contents of a library,retrieve facts, and formulate questions was laughable to many. The1957 movie Desk Set accurately mirrored the way ordinary citizensperceived computers and their possible consequences. On anotherlevel, the film’s focus on libraries was an ideal juxtaposition ofhumans’ intellectual capacity with machines’ processing capacity.

social impacts. The film operates on two levels:as a source of information about how peopleconstrued the attributes of computers in the1950s and as a cultural artifact conveying howpeople reacted to the perceived consequences ofcomputerization. The film occupies the intersec-tion of cultural history, with its interest in read-ers, spectators, and other consumers of culturalexpression, and social informatics, with its inter-est in the consequences of computer use. It thuscan be a primary source for the historian taking asocial informatics approach to understandingthe interactions of people and technologies inthe past.4 The narrative that follows provides adescriptive evaluation of the film’s historical con-text, drawing on both popular and professionalviews of computer technology’s significance. Inthe spirit of historical social informatics, it inter-prets cultural production and consumption asevidence documenting the consequences ofcomputerization, placing popular culture in itstechnological context. Such a method makes itpossible to consider what computers meant todiverse groups, including inventors, creativewriters, theater and film critics, library and infor-mation science researchers and educators, andpracticing librarians. Beyond that, it establishesa foundation from which subsequent studies cangauge how those constructed meanings changedwithin and across groups over time.

The Ephrons offer a script whose theme iswoman against machine, with woman master-ing machine as part of the happy ending.Bunny—the lead character—anticipates theevents of the 1960s when special librarians didbecome early adopters of new informationretrieval systems.5 It is tempting to credit theEphrons for their ability to predict the future.But a closer look indicates that theirs was less aprediction than a projection of what computermanufacturers hoped and planned.

In the early 1950s, there were pockets ofresistance to electronic computers even withinIBM’s vast organization, according to historianJames Cortada.6 Among the doubters wereIBM’s own marketing executives, who believedthat the new computers’ high cost limited theirpotential market to a finite set of military andgovernment agencies. Even if the pricing couldbe reduced to make computers more attractiveto business clients, the company would end upcompeting with itself, since it already had cor-nered the market for the earlier punched-cardmachines. During the Korean War, IBM securedgovernment funding to develop the DefenseCalculator, which became the company’s firstelectronic computer. The company introducedit as the IBM 701 in 1952 and shipped 19 of

these “Electronic Data Processing Machines” by1955. A smaller product designed for the com-mercial market, the IBM 650, went into massproduction in 1954, with 450 sold the first yearand which eventually reached 1,800 units.Caterpillar and Chrysler were among the com-mercial buyers. “[I]t was during the period1954–57,” Cortada has written, “that market-ing executives at IBM finally made the conver-sion to a procomputer position.”7

Writer Henry Ephron and director WalterLang borrowed equipment from IBM to use onthe set, an early example of the kind of prod-uct placement that would subsequentlybecome customary as name-brand productsand services insinuated themselves into moviescenes. The film’s opening scene features awide-angle shot of the company’s New Yorkshowroom complete with a variety of data pro-cessing machines. The camera zooms to a close-up of a single machine emblazoned with theIBM logo. The credits appear as if the machineis printing them, and they include a statementacknowledging the company’s involvementand assistance. IBM’s employee newsletterreported on this public relations coup, notingnot only the display of products but also therole of six employees in securing and modify-ing the equipment and in training NevaPatterson, who played the computer operatorin the film. As the newsletter asserted, “IBMalso played a starring role in the film.”8 TheEphrons intended even more. They wrote anopening scene in which Bunny enters theshowroom and witnesses a demonstration of acalculating machine and hears a promotionalspiel about another computer that can learnfrom its errors.9 That scene did not appear inthe final version, however.

For its cooperation, IBM received a thankfulacknowledgment in the film credits. In thislight, the film can be construed as a piece of themarketing and advertising effort to transformthinking machines developed out of militaryand government initiatives into standard busi-ness equipment.10 As Emerson Pugh wrote inhis history of IBM, the company’s message wasthat computers “were not designed to replacepeople [but] to help people, by relieving themof drudgery.”11 The film portrayed the machineas nonthreatening because it was unthinkingand therefore suitable to take over repetitivetasks that human workers found boring.

Calculating contextBy the mid-1950s, the American mass audi-

ence had been exposed to the idea of a thinkingmachine enough to recognize and appreciate a

July–September 2002 15

parody of it.12 In 1945, Vannevar Bush’s essay“As We May Think,” with its proposal for amicrofilm-based scholarly workstation, appearedin the Atlantic Monthly, and both Life and Timemagazines promoted the proposed device as athinking machine.13 Then, in 1948, MIT math-ematician Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: or,Control and Communication in the Animal and theMachine, was published by John Wiley & Sons inNew York and by Technology Press in Cam-bridge, Massachusetts. Wiener had becomeinterested in computing machines during WorldWar II, when he worked on control mechanismsfor aiming guns. Cybernetics, with its assertionof the comparability of human and computerbrains, included a chapter on “ComputingMachines and the Nervous System” and anoth-er on “Learning and Self-Reproducing Ma-chines.” Reviews of Wiener’s book appeared inscholarly journals such as American Anthro-pologist and American Sociological Review as wellas in popular magazines such as Time.

The next year, Wiley published EdmundBerkeley’s Giant Brains or Machines That Think.Berkeley had worked on the sequential calcula-tor project at Harvard during World War II andhad done research at Prudential Insurance until1948 when he left the firm to establish his owncompany. A founder of the Association forComputing Machinery and an antinuclear-waractivist, Berkeley became involved in teaching,publishing, and robotics research.14 He wroteGiant Brains for a lay audience whom hethought needed to understand computers’technical capabilities as well as their potentialthreats, including widespread unemployment.Published in 1949, the author’s preface, writtenin New York that June, asserted that:

These new machines are important. They do thework of hundreds of human beings for the wagesof a dozen …. Along with the release of atomicenergy, they are one of the great achievements ofthe present century. No one can afford to beunaware of their significance.15

The book was widely reviewed, not only ingeneral media such as the Saturday Review, theNew York Times, and the Christian Science Monitor,but also in specialist periodicals such as Chemicaland Engineering News and Management Review.Giant Brains went into a second printing inFebruary of 1950 and by one year later, it hadsold 7,500 copies.16 In the mid-1950s, librarianswere still discussing Berkeley’s assertion thatlibrary users would someday be able to search bysubject in an electronic catalog and request deliv-ery of full-text copies from the list of results.17

Also influential, although not published fora mass audience, was Alan Turing’s essay“Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”which appeared in the journal Mind in 1950with the opening line: “I propose to considerthe question, ‘Can machines think?’” He dis-missed this question a few pages later as“meaningless,” while nevertheless concludingthat it would be possible by the late 20th cen-tury to devise a computer that would imitatehuman responses well enough to fool a personin what would come to be known as the“Turing test.”18 Also influential was physicistJohn von Neumann and his interest in automa-ta. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he devel-oped a theory encompassing both naturalautomata, such as the human nervous system,and artificial, such as the electronic computer.19

But the coverage of developments in thenascent computer industry in popular maga-zines and on television reached mass audiencesthat no researcher could. Over the course of the1950s, newspapers and periodicals slowlyincreased their coverage of new technologydevelopments and tracked installations of giantbrains in various government and commercialsettings. Opening the decade was Time’s coverlabeled “Can Man Build a Superman?”20 Thecover featured a caricature of the Mark III com-puter, which Harvard was constructing for theUS Navy. The feature story began with anaccount of Bessie (from math’s “BesselFunctions”), a computer created at Harvard in1944 and still responding to “commands” in1950. Time referred to the machine as “a prog-enetrix, a sort of mechanical Eve,” who was“dim-witted and slow” compared to her off-spring such as the newer and faster Mark seriesof computers (a motif that seems to parallel thestereotype of the old-fashioned female librari-an being replaced by the up-to-date informa-tion professional).21 The article served tointroduce readers to developments in the nas-cent computer industry and to a few of theindividuals behind the developments, includ-ing MIT’s Wiener, Harvard’s Howard HathawayAiken, and Bell Telephone Laboratories’ ClaudeE. Shannon. The article also gave readers a wayto think about thinking machines, suggestingthat they would relieve humans of “intellectu-al drudgery” but also suggesting that comput-ers, like humans, could suffer memory lapsesfrom the stresses of overwork.22

In 1951, newspaper and magazine storiesdescribed the US Census Bureau’s installation ofa $1 million Univac. That same year, respectedjournalist Edward R. Murrow featured MIT’sWhirlwind computer on his television program

16 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

Information Retrieval and Desk Set

See It Now. Then, CBS News used a Univac onelection night in 1952 to predict Eisenhower’slandslide over Stevenson. The next spring,Collier’s magazine asked “Can a MechanicalBrain Replace You?” The Collier’s story wastimed to appear the week that IBM began mass-producing its 701 model. The story reportedthat IBM expected demand for its computers togrow, but only if management could convinceworkers to adopt the new technology. IBManswered the title question, for as Collier’sreported, “[T]he company is going out of itsway to teach people why mechanical brainscannot take over the world’s affairs from thehuman inhabitants.”23

As scientists and engineers sought ways tomake calculating machines ever more efficientand as the American public puzzled over the pos-sible consequences of inventing ever more pow-erful technologies, professionals in the fields oflibrary science and documentation began to con-sider how computers might help them cope withwhat they saw as an exponential increase in pub-lications.24 Librarian Fremont Rider in the early1940s issued his groundbreaking assertion thatresearch library collections were threatened bytheir own exponential growth.25 He spent thenext several years promoting his solution to theproblem, the microcard, a three-inch by five-inch card designed to hold a periodical article’scataloging on one side and a miniaturization ofits full text on the other. Although Rider’s meth-ods were criticized at the time and subsequentlydiscredited,26 both librarians and documentalistsaccepted the underlying need to gain biblio-graphic control over the mounting numbers andkinds of publications while also providing con-venient access to those publications. As editorVernon D. Tate put it in 1950 in his openingessay of the first issue of American Documentation:

Powerful, in fact compelling, factors exist thatrender action in the entire broad field of docu-mentation imperative if a breakdown of facilitiesfor accumulating, organizing, storing and com-municating knowledge is to be avoided.27

Articles in the new journal dealt with diverseaspects of “documentation,” a term which, Tateexplained, “refers to the creation, transmission,collection, classification, and use of ‘docu-ments’; documents may be broadly defined asrecorded knowledge in any format.”28 Ideasabout the pressing problems of informationorganization, bibliographic control, andretrieval circulated throughout AmericanDocumentation and other trade and scholarlyjournals for librarians and documentalists.

Among those searching for solutions was USDepartment of Agriculture Librarian Ralph R.Shaw. In his Windsor lecture at the Universityof Illinois in 1950, Shaw discussed a variety ofmethods for organizing, storing, retrieving, andreproducing published documents, and hisremarks were published the next year.29 ToShaw, the computer was only one of many“electronic sorting and reproducing devices,”and he dismissed the limited capabilities of thedigital computer in two paragraphs.

He devoted several pages to the capabilitiesof the Rapid Selector—a microfilm-based devicethat made it possible to search, retrieve, andorder copies of articles by subject—champi-oned by Vannevar Bush. Shaw said that somehad referred to it as “a ‘thinking’ machine or‘electronic brain’.”30 Shaw did not consider itso, however, noting that “The only thing themachine does is to store and reproduce data inaccordance with whatever instructions arestored or called for by human minds.”31 Shaw’scomments suggest that he considered thinkingto be a human rather than a machine activity,even if the machine were a digital computer.Embedded in that argument was a defense oflibrarianship, a defense Shaw stated explicitlyin another essay promoting the Selector, enti-tled “Will the Machines Take Over?”32 Writingfor readers of the Library Journal, Shaw assertedthat librarianship involved facility with theintellectual and the physical aspects of infor-mation. He rejected the attempts by “so-called‘information officers’” to claim the interestingintellectual realm for themselves while relegat-ing librarians to the role of collection custodi-an. Shaw drew an analogy between thereference librarian’s cognitive processes and thescientist’s as each theorized a solution to aninformation problem and then deployed a log-ical process to solve it. He concluded that theapproach to information organization andaccess in the future “appears to be Dewey andelectrons, rather than Dewey or electrons.”33

Shaw considered the work of organizing anddescribing the world’s literature as important asthe work of creating new devices for storing andretrieving it. That is why Shaw expressed con-cern over the validity of Rider’s work and theuses to which it was being put. The ScientificAmerican, Shaw noted in a 1953 essay, suggestedthat “electronic machines” would take care ofthe problem Rider had identified. Shaw also crit-icized “an eminent physicist” for believing thatelectronic machines, rather than traditionallibrary methods of organization and access,could handle the crisis.34 He may have beenreferring to either of the two physicists who also


gave Windsor lectures at the University ofIllinois and whose presentations were publishedin the same volume with Shaw’s.

One lecturer was the eminent Louis N.Ridenour, who served as a professor of physics andhead of the graduate college at the university from1947 to 1951. The second was Albert G. Hill, pro-fessor of physics and director of the MIT ResearchLaboratory of Electronics. Ridenour opened hisspeech by invoking Fremont Rider’s prediction ofexponential growth and then proceeded torecount the problems that attended library stor-age and retrieval. Calling for the librarian and theelectrical engineer to work together, Ridenourasserted that the problems could be solved withbetter technologies.35 For his part, Hill reported onexisting and expected capabilities of computersand concluded that “what is required now is athoroughgoing operational analysis of the libraryproblem and then a long and arduous stint of sys-tems engineering.”36 Implicit in both physicists’remarks was a critique of library practices as hide-bound and unimaginative.

Unstated throughout Shaw’s writings was anysuspicion that in a competition between “Deweyand electrons,” between the traditional methodsof librarians and the new methods of informa-tion scientists, Dewey would lose. AlthoughShaw himself exemplified the librarian willing toadopt and even create new technologies, he soonsaw the Rapid Selector eclipsed by the evolu-tionary breakthroughs in electronic computing.Shaw did not suggest that there might be a gen-der dimension to characterizations of the librar-ian as passive custodian or to concerns that in acompetition the predominantly female occupa-tion was at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, formu-lating the burgeoning publications probleminvolved a simultaneous critique of and coopta-tion of librarians.

The experience of an influential figure inlibrary science education, Jesse Shera, illustratesthe situation. In a discussion of documentation,Shera and his coauthor and University ofChicago colleague Margaret Egan blamed librar-ians for losing ground to the documentalists.Librarians had failed to continue developing theorganizational tools, such as the Dewey decimalsystem, created during the late 19th century.The growth of publication and the demands ofscholarly research required sophisticated stor-age and retrieval tools. But librarians neglectedthe needs of scholars and researchers for theallure of mass access. Shera and Egan chastened:“When librarianship was lured into the popu-lar cult of universal education and self-improve-ment, documentation … ventured alone intothe higher complexities of bibliographic organ-

ization.”37 In an earlier essay published as partof a series on library personnel shortages andthe need to recruit, Shera had excoriated librar-ians’ complicity in maintaining “the popularstereotype of themselves as vapid eccentricsexcessively preoccupied with the trivial—inother words, as fussy old maids of either sex.”38

The main problem lay in librarians’ rejection ofinnovation, particularly that devised in the fieldof documentation and information science.This resistance masqueraded as

self-effacing dedication, symbolized by the littleold lady behind the circulation desk.… Seldomis the library patron aware of the intellectualprocesses which have made it possible for the lit-tle old lady to put the right book into his hands;very rarely is she aware of them herself.39

The context of Shera’s writings helps toexplain what might be characterized as his ten-dency to blame the victim. He became dean ofthe library school at Western ReserveUniversity in 1952. Early in 1955, he hired twodocumentation researchers, James W. Perry andAllen Kent, and established a center for themto study machine-based information searching.During the next six years, until Perry left, Sherastruggled to keep the information scienceresearch center from overtaking the library sci-ence school. He had seen the potential for syn-ergy but instead found himself in a turf war, asCurtis Wright has described.40 In his writings ofthe period, Shera conceptualized the conflict asone of intellect (information science) versusservice (library science), of the idea that infor-mation science would provide the theory onwhich the practice of librarianship would bebased. He did not analyze the gender dimen-sion of such a formulation, despite (or perhapsbecause of) his reliance on gender stereotypesto make his point about the passivity of librar-ians in the face of information innovation. Heargued that librarianship, rooted in service, andinformation science, rooted in theory, hadmuch to offer each other and that their respec-tive practitioners should pay attention to eachother’s knowledge. Had he instead defendedthe library school against the information sci-ence research center, he would have foundhimself in the position of siding with the littleold ladies against the big young guys. But asdean of a school of library science, he could notabandon the old maids to embrace the docu-mentalists. He attempted to bridge the twofields by arguing that it should be so.41

Despite the claims made, computing prod-ucts of the time functioned as sophisticated cal-



culators and record keepers rather than infor-mation storage and retrieval systems.Consumers, especially librarians, knew this,somewhat counter to Shera’s belief that librari-ans knew little about the new techniques beingdeveloped. In 1956, an issue of the journalLibrary Trends devoted to “Mechanization inLibraries” collected essays on office appliances,communication and transportation systems,and, in a word, gadgetry. Mortimer Taube, aninternationally known librarian who hadcofounded a company called Documentationand was working to create subject-based infor-mation retrieval systems, contributed an essayon “Machine Retrieval of Information.”

Taube noted that a working party onmechanical indexing at the Royal SocietyScientific Information Conference in 1948 haddetermined that the industry had developedequipment that the potential buyers were notready to adopt. Taube countered that

[librarians’] failure to use machines for informa-tion retrieval is not attributable to their unwill-ingness to experiment and try new techniquesbut to the prima facie evidence that the availablemachines are not satisfactory and cannot per-form information retrieval functions as ade-quately as a card file or a printed catalog.42

In other words, librarians were informed butwary, yet capable of being convinced by aneffective system, just as Desk Set depicted them.

That combination of interest, skepticism, andhopefulness was apparent among members of theSpecial Libraries Association (SLA) when they metin Detroit in 1955. James E. Myers, manager of theMethods and Procedures Division of Burroughs,noted that librarians were intrigued by the possi-bilities of automation and that their interest hadrisen in response to the news about the develop-ment of electronic computers. Myers discussedthe possible social consequences of automation,including the likely reconfiguration of jobs andskills. But he emphasized that computers weredependent on humans to design and deploy theircapabilities. And he criticized the promoters ofcomputer technology for confusing consumers byanthropomorphizing the machines.

Myers also objected to the idea, which hetraced to the field of cybernetics, that a com-puter could have a nervous breakdown, “a priv-ilege almost exclusively reserved for humanbeings.”43 Such professional skepticism persist-ed among librarians. The authors of a textbookpublished in the early 1960s, InformationStorage and Retrieval, acknowledged that somereference librarians who felt threatened by

computerization defended their turf by point-ing with pride to their ability to retrieve infor-mation without the assistance of computingmachines. The authors concluded that librari-ans needed to understand that computerswould not replace the library so much as trans-form it into a “complementary electronicorganization” capable of meeting the demandsof the information age.44

The professions of librarianship and of infor-mation science would eventually coalesce.45 Buttensions between them would remain, includ-ing the unacknowledged but palpable gender-related tensions that accompanied the mergerof a predominantly female occupation with apredominantly male one.46 On the big screen,the battle of the sexes raged alongside the shift-ing jurisdictions of library and information sci-ence. Desk Set had drawn on popular knowledgeabout computers and had elaborated on theprofessional and personal tensions in theTracy–Hepburn alliance. The result was a cul-tural production that audience members couldinterpret from their own perspectives.

Women employed in offices or occupied athome may have fantasized about the librarians’workspace, pulsing with female camaraderie andwit. They may have identified with Hepburn—as so many had in her earlier films—as a smart,funny, and self-reliant woman. By winning thebattle of the brains, she also negotiated a truce inthe battle of the sexes. But some viewers mayhave been glad their own jobs, paid or unpaid,seemed more secure than the ones on the screen.Different spectators interpreted the script fromvarious perspectives, judging from the reviewsthat appeared in publications aimed at librarians,the mass public, and the film trade. Two tradejournals for librarians reviewed the earlier playversion when it was presented in New York. Thejournal Special Libraries had a readership mostlike the librarian characters who worked not in aschool, college, or public library but in a corpo-rate special library serving a particular clientele.The Special Libraries review emphasized thehappy ending that reaffirmed that librarianswere irreplaceable.47 The editor of a trade maga-zine aimed more generally at public librarians,the Wilson Library Bulletin, wrote that the fourlibrarian characters were not the usual caricaturesbut instead represented “as reasonable a cross-section of personality and dedication and man-hunting as one might find in any large or speciallibrary.”48 The editor praised the script for usinghumor to educate the audience about comput-ers and to demystify the process of automation.She reassured her readers that computers couldnot do all of the work of librarians but could do


the repetitive tasks, thus freeing them for a moreprofessional and productive level of work.

Librarians apparently understood the impli-cations of the script. But reviewers at general-interest magazines and newspapers focusedmore on the stars, seeing the script as too light-weight for the formidable talents of Tracy andHepburn. And the casting of Hepburn workedagainst the comic tensions embedded in theplot. As the New York Times reviewer wrote:

It simply does not seem very ominous when theythreaten to put a mechanical brain in a broadcast-ing company’s reference library, over which theefficient Miss Hepburn has sway.… The prospectof automation is plainly no menace to Kate.49

Reviews in the trade press serving the motionpicture industry offered interpretations of thefilm. A review by William Weaver in the MotionPicture Herald considered the film “excellent” andreported that “it played like a house afire” at theVillage Theatre in Westwood, California.50 TheFilm Daily called it a “superior product” and sug-gested that women in particular would like it.51

In a thoughtful vein, James Powers wrote in theHollywood Reporter that the film “should havemeaning for everyone who has ever beenexposed to the frightening capacities of the mod-ern machine.”52 More than any other reviewer ofthe film, Powers comprehended the substance ofthe story rather than writing it off as an inconse-quential comedy. Powers understood the script’scontrast of the “unscientific” human approach toinformation retrieval with the systematic methodof the machine. He also noted the ironic twistwhen the machine exceeded its capacity andturned out to be as unreliable as a human being.And he remarked on the further irony thatBunny’s boss, played by Gig Young, was himself“practically indistinguishable from a very effi-cient machine.” But he doubted that audienceswould be reassured by the happy ending. “Formost of us, crowded and menaced by machinesof increasing size and cerebral dimensions,”Powers wrote, the film was comforting but thereality was less so.52

ConclusionThe comedic elements of Desk Set revolved

around the notion that humans who thoughtthey could be replaced by machines were amus-ing for their naivete. To demonstrate that, though,the writers had to find a plausible way to contrasthuman and computer capabilities. What setting,what profession, could best juxtapose the intel-lectual capacity of humans with the processingcapacity of machines? How best to demonstrate

that thinking involved more than memory andcalculation, that it in fact involved embodiedhuman beings? There could have been no moreeffective setting than a library, where informationstorage and retrieval are core functions. And therecould have been no more effective foil for Emmythan Bunny, a librarian steeped in the subtletiesof inquiry, of information seeking and use.

But Bunny was an imaginary librarian andEmmy an imaginary computer. How can apiece of fictional entertainment such as Desk Settell us anything about the history of libraryautomation? It cannot chronicle the individu-als’ efforts, technical advances, and organiza-tional maneuverings that made it possible toimagine sophisticated electronic informationstorage and retrieval. But as one source con-sulted in a historical social informaticsapproach to research, the film represents anaspect of the discourse surrounding and shap-ing the development of information technolo-gies. The script itself belongs to the history ofcomputing, both in its original performancesin the 1950s and in the subsequent uses towhich it has been put.

At the same time, using Desk Set as a primarydocument can reveal some possible truths aboutthe practice of library and information sciencethat more standard kinds of documents cannot.For example, the contemporaneous published lit-erature on library reference service is fraught withproblems of epistemology and interpretationbecause it so often is prescriptive of ideal practicerather than descriptive of actual practice.Additionally, the movie presents the genderdimension of the information professions in away the documents, primary and secondary, can-not or have not. The very nature of the structur-al fissure between documentalists and librariansmade it difficult to recognize the significance ofgender. On screen, however, these gender differ-ences are recorded visually, behaviorally, and vis-cerally between engineers and librarians, betweentechnophiles and ecumenists. Such aspects of thefilm continue to attract a following among LISeducators, students, and professionals.

Further, Desk Set supplies some evidence indi-cating how Americans in the 1950s made senseof computer technology in the pivotal decadeduring which computing machines expandedbeyond military and government applicationsinto business settings. Despite the threateningaspects of automation that the film acknowl-edged, the script was upbeat, in part because theromantic-comedy genre required a light tonewhere problems are opportunities for humor.Amidst the development and deployment ofcomputer technology in the 1950s, the idea of a



computer with the ability to store the contentsof an entire library, retrieve facts and quotationsposed in natural-language queries, and formu-late its own questions to clarify human querieswas so far-fetched to a mass audience as to belaughable. Yet, as Desk Set showed, there was noguarantee that the calculating machines wouldstay put in the payroll department. Instead, theymight invade the very space that professionalwomen had carved out for themselves in oppo-sition to the ideology of feminine domesticity.In the 1950s film, the deal was sealed with a kissframed entirely by computer equipment. Themarriage of librarian and engineer was the end.In “real life,” the union of library and informa-tion science was only the beginning of a longand contested relationship.

AcknowledgmentsI would like to express my appreciation to RobertGodfrey at the IBM Archives, Kevin D. Corbitt atthe Charles Babbage Institute, and ChristopherProm at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Archives for their assistance.

References and notes1. The version viewed for this study is Desk Set, dir.

Walter Lang, Twentieth Century Fox, 1957,videocassette, Fox, 1991; see also W. Marchant,The Desk Set: A Comedy in Three Acts, S. French,New York, 1956.

2. When I have presented different versions of thisarticle’s contents to LIS audiences, attendeeshave reported that portions of the film areassigned in courses, that student groups arrangeto watch the film together, and that somestudents stage portions of the play. A former LISstudent reported that a colleague gave her acopy of the video as a going-away present whenshe quit her job to attend graduate school aspreparation for becoming a professional librarian.In June 2001, the San Francisco Public Libraryscheduled a showing of the film to coincide withthe annual meeting of the American Library Asso-ciation in that city.

3. Charles Babbage Inst., Center for the History ofInformation Processing, “Hollywood and Com-puters,” http://www.cbi.umn.edu/resources/hollywood.html.

4. The key statement about social informatics is byR. Kling, “What is Social Informatics and WhyDoes it Matter?” D-Lib Magazine, vol. 5, no. 1,Jan. 1999, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/kling/01kling.html; an excellent example of his-torical research that exhibits a social informaticssensibility and uses popular films as source mate-rials is P.N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computersand the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America,

MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996.5. D. Newman, “Dialogue on Dialog: Interview with

Roger Summit,” Wilson Library Bull., vol. 60, Jan.1986, p. 23.

6. J. Cortada, The Computer in the United States:From Laboratory to Market, 1930–1960, M.E.Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y., 1993, pp. 78-81.

7. Ibid., p. 86.8. “Calculatin’ Emmy,” Business Machines, IBM

Archives, Somers, N.Y., July 1957.9. P. and H. Ephron, “The Desk Set, Final Script”

(typescript), 11 Dec. 1956, pp. 1-5. Rare BookRoom/Special Collections, Michigan State Univ.,East Lansing.

10. W. Aspray and D.D. Beaver, “Marketing the Mon-ster: Advertising Computer Technology,” Annalsof the History of Computing, vol. 8, no. 2, Apr.1986, pp. 127-143.

11. E.W. Pugh, Building IBM, MIT Press, Cambridge,Mass., 1995, p. 143.

12. A good starting point for the history of computertechnology is H. Rheingold, Tools for Thought:The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technol-ogy, rev. ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2000,http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/.

13. M.K. Buckland, “Emanuel Goldberg, ElectronicDocument Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush’sMemex,” J. Am. Soc. for Information Science, vol.43, no. 4, May 1992, pp. 284, http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldbush.html. Thedesire for an information system capable of sur-passing a single brain’s storage and retrievalcapacities predates the computer era; for exam-ple, see W.B. Rayward, “H.G. Wells’s Idea of aWorld Brain: A Critical Reassessment,” J. Am. Soc.for Information Science, vol. 50, May 15, 1999,pp. 557-573, http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~wrayward/Wellss_Idea_of_World_Brain.htm.

14. P. Hennessy, “Finding Aid for Edmund C. BerkeleyPapers,” Charles Babbage Inst. of Computer His-tory, Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis, http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/berkeley.htm,23 June 1999.

15. E.C. Berkeley, Giant Brains or Machines That Think,John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1949, p. vii.

16. G.H. Lovitt to E.C. Berkeley, 14 Feb. 1951 (typedletter), Edmund C. Berkeley Papers, Charles Bab-bage Inst. of Computer History, Univ. ofMinnesota, Minneapolis.

17. H.E. Loftus, “Automation,” Special Libraries, vol.46, Mar. 1955, pp. 127-128.

18. A.M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelli-gence,” Mind, vol. 59, pp. 433-560, http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html.

19. W. Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins ofModern Computing, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,1990, pp. 189-201.

20. Time, 23 Jan. 1950, cover.


21. “The Thinking Machine,” Time, 23 Jan. 1950, p. 54.22. Ibid., pp. 59-60.23. J. Lear, “Can a Mechanical Brain Replace You?”

Collier’s, vol. 131, 4 Apr. 1953, pp. 58-63.24. F.G. Kilgour, “History of Library Computeriza-

tion,” J. Library Automation, vol. 3, no. 3, Sept.1970, pp. 218-229.

25. F. Rider, The Scholar and the Future of the ResearchLibrary: A Problem and Its Solution, Hadham Press,New York, 1944.

26. M. Jamison, “The Microcard: Fremont Rider’s Pre-computer Revolution,” Libraries & Culture, vol. 23,no. 1, Winter 1988, pp. 8-9; also, R.E. Molyneux,“What Did Rider Do? An Inquiry into the Method-ology of Fremont Rider’s The Scholar and theFuture of the Research Library,” Libraries & Culture,vol. 29, no. 3, Summer 1994, pp. 297-325.

27. V.D. Tate, “Introducing American Documenta-tion,” Am. Documentation, vol. 1, no. 1, Winter(Jan.) 1950, p. 7.

28. Ibid., p. 3.29. R.R. Shaw, “Machines and the Bibliographical

Problems of the Twentieth Century,” Bibliographyin an Age of Science, Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana,1951, pp. 37-71.

30. R.R. Shaw, “Machines and the BibliographicalProblems,” p. 66. An account of the developmentof the Selector and Shaw’s involvement appears inC. Burke, Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush,Ultra, and the Other Memex, Scarecrow Press,Metuchen, N.J., 1994, especially pp. 332-350.

31. R.R. Shaw, “Machines and the BibliographicalProblems,” p. 66.

32. R.R. Shaw, “Will the Machines Take Over?”Library J., vol. 76, July 1951, pp. 1085-1087.

33. Ibid., p. 1087.34. R.R. Shaw, “From Fright to Frankenstein,” D.C.

Libraries, vol. 24, no. 1, Jan. 1953, p. 8.35. L.N. Ridenour, “Bibliography in an Age of Science,”

Bibliography in an Age of Science, pp. 5-35.36. A.G. Hill, “The Storage, Processing, and Commu-

nication of Information,” Bibliography in an Age ofScience, pp. 73-90; the quotation is on p. 86.

37. J.H. Shera and M.E. Egan, “A Review of the PresentState of Librarianship and Documentation,” Docu-mentation and the Organization of Knowledge,Archon Books, Hamden, Conn., 1966, p. 36.

38. J.H. Shera, “Little Girls Don’t Play Librarian,”Library J., vol. 87, 15 Dec. 1962, p. 4484.

39. Ibid., p. 4486.40. H.C. Wright, “Shera as a Bridge between Librari-

anship and Information Science,” J. Library Histo-ry, vol. 20, Spring 1985, pp. 137-156.

41. Ibid., pp. 142-143. Wright noted that 20 yearslater, Shera recanted: “... I am now convincedthat I was wrong.... I seriously question whetherthere is a true interdisciplinary relation betweenlibrarianship and information science.”

42. M. Taube, “Machine Retrieval of Information,”Library Trends, vol. 5, Oct. 1956, p. 303; also,“Mortimer Taube, 1910–1965,” Pioneers of Infor-mation Science in North America Web site, http://www.asis.org/Features/Pioneers/taube.htm.

43. J.E. Myers, “Automation: What It Is and What It IsNot,” Special Libraries, vol. 46, no. 7, Sept. 1955,p. 310.

44. J. Becker and R.M. Hayes, Information Storage andRetrieval: Tools, Elements, Theories, John Wiley &Sons, New York, 1963, pp. 40-42.

45. W.B. Rayward, “Library and Information Sciences:Disciplinary Differentiation, Competition, andConvergence,” The Study of Information: Interdis-ciplinary Messages, F. Machlup and U. Mansfield,eds., John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1983, pp.343-363; another perspective is offered in R.V.Williams, “The Documentation and SpecialLibraries Movements in the United States,1910–1960,” Historical Studies in Information Sci-ence, T. Bellardo Hahn and M. Buckland, eds.,Information Today for the Am. Soc. of Informa-tion Science, Medford, N.J., 1998, pp. 171-179.

46. For an extended discussion of the gender dimen-sions of the evolving profession of librarianship,see R.M. Harris, Librarianship: The Erosion of aWoman’s Profession, Ablex, Norwood, N.J., 1992.

47. “The Desk Set Stars Shirley Booth as a Special Librar-ian,” Special Libraries, vol. 47, Feb. 1956, p. 87.

48. M.D. Loizeaux, “Talking Shop ….,” Wilson LibraryBull., vol. 30, May 1956, p. 704.

49. B. Crowther, “Desk Set,” New York Times, 16 May1957, p. 28.

50. W.R. Weaver, “Desk Set,” Motion Picture Herald,18 May 1957, p. 377.

51. “Reviews of the New Films,” The Film Daily, 10May 1957, p. 7.

52. J. Powers, “‘Desk Set’ is a Riotous Comedy withSmart Cast,” The Hollywood Reporter, 10 May1957, p. 3.

Cheryl Knott Malone is an asso-ciate professor at the Universityof Arizona, School of Informa-tion Resources and Library Sci-ence. Her research interestsinclude the history of librariesand the construction of genderand race in the information pro-

fessions. She has a PhD in library and information sci-ence from the University of Texas and master’s degreesin history and in library science from the University ofArizona.

Readers may contact Cheryl Knott Malone,University of Arizona, School of InformationResources and Library Science, 1515 East First St.,Tucson, AZ 85719; [email protected].



Documents

Imagining information retrieval in the library: Desk Set in historical context