Posted by Sage Van Wing

A librarian friend of mine recently turned me on to the fantastic 1957 movie “Desk Set.” This is the last of the Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy romantic comedies and one of the only ones filmed in color. It is witty and funny and, best of all, thoughtful about issues that still concern us today.

Based on a Broadway play, the movie pits the hands-on research crew at a large television broadcast company in the 50’s against the coming of technology in the form of a giant, noisy, imperfect early computer known as the “mechanical brain.” Hepburn leads the reference whiz kids, Tracy pioneers the scary machinery that threatens their jobs.

The mechanical brain, the researchers are told, can answer the most complicated of questions in mere seconds. Simply type in a few keywords, and, with the click of a button, Kate and her team of witty librarians are obsolete.

Google, anyone?

In the age of the internets, when the answer to anything is merely a keystroke away, what happens to the humble librarians who have for so long been the gatekeepers of information?

Not surprisingly, librarians are quick to point out that Google does not make them obsolete. “There are limitations with the search engines,” Marilyn Parr, public service and collections access officer at the Library of Congress told me. “You can type in ‘Thomas Jefferson’ in any search engine and you will get thousands of hits. How do you then sort through those to find the ones that are verifiable information, authentic and not someone’s personal opinion?”

The job of a reference librarian these days, says my librarian friend, is to help people use Google more efficiently. “We spend a lot of time helping people be more efficient on the internet. Oftentimes, we won’t even look in a book.” Most of the former “library schools” have now changed their names to “School of Information.” Their graduates are “information specialists” not simply librarians. The difference is not merely semantic. “The job of a librarian now is to teach information literacy—to teach people how to evaluate the information that they do find,” said Chris Sherman, executive editor of industry blog site SearchEngineWatch.com. “I think that’s where librarians are extremely important. They are trained to evaluate the quality of the information.”

Google is a powerful tool, but for serious research it should be used with caution, and preferably in tandem with other sources. Even Craig Silverstein, Google’s Director of Technology, has said that “information professionals are needed to help people articulate their information needs.”

“When Google doesn’t work, most people don’t have a plan B,” said Joe Janes, an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, who teaches a course on Google. “Librarians have lots of plan B’s. We know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google.”

In fact, most of the librarians I talked to said their jobs are actually getting more interesting now. While it’s true that they do get fewer questions, the ones that they do get take longer to answer and are much more involved. “People can answer the basic reference questions themselves,” said my librarian friend with a glint in her eye, “they come to us with the really hard stuff.”

This brings us back to the movie. In the final scene of “Desk Set,” the computer, when asked a simple question, is very effective. However, when faced with a more complicated question, it spews out ream upon ream of useless trivia. Meanwhile, Katharine Hepburn coyly recites the correct answer. In the end, the reference librarians get to keep their jobs because it is obvious to everyone that their skills are necessary in order to get the right results from the unwieldy machine.

I know I still call the New York Public Library’s Reference Line at least once a week.