The Librarian and the Machine

Congratulations to Grace O'Connor from Dublin City University Library, whose blog post received a special mention in the A&SL Blog Post Competition 2026. 

The competition invited library staff and LIS students based in Ireland to submit a blog post exploring how library staff, libraries and information work are portrayed across film, television, literature, art, social media, gaming, news media or other cultural formats.

Still from Desk Set (1957), directed by Walter Lang. Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox via the Everett Collection. 

The year is 2026. You are a librarian and AI is coming for your job.

The year is 2004. You are a librarian and Google is coming for your job.
The year is 1957. You are a librarian and a computer is coming for your job.
Time is a flat circle.

In the romantic comedy Desk Set (1957), directed by Walter Lang, Katharine Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, a reference librarian in the Federal Broadcasting Network. Spencer Tracy plays the inventor of EMERAC (Electromagnetic MEmory and Research Arithmetical Calculator), a computer that could leave Bunny and her colleagues out of a job.

It is a theme familiar to anyone working in libraries. Every few years, a new technology arrives promising to make what we do obsolete. What makes Desk Set interesting is that it manages to be both a warning about technology and, ultimately, an optimistic film about it. More importantly, it is a surprisingly affectionate portrait of librarianship and information work.

“If I didn't work here I'd pay to get in”

The Reference Department in Desk Set is a wonderful place.

It is busy, chaotic and unmistakably feminine. The women shop on their lunch breaks, borrow each other's lipsticks, gossip and tease each other. There is something particularly striking about the contrast between the Reference Department and the organisation around it. Like many real-world libraries, the department is staffed predominantly by women, while the people with overall institutional power are men. At one point Bunny says, “If I didn't work here I'd pay to get in” (Desk Set, 1957).

Bunny initially looks like the classic caricature of the librarian. She is a middle-aged woman, swaddled in cardigans, pens in her hair, and she lives alone. Yet the character is not simply a joke about librarians. Bunny was loosely inspired by Agnes E. Law, a former CBS librarian who established the network's research library (AFI, 2026).

The researchers in the Reference Department aren't passive assistants waiting to be told what to do. They interpret questions, find sources and work out what people are actually asking. As Bunny puts it, “No machine can do our job. Too many cross references” (Desk Set, 1957). The wording may sound quaint now, but the underlying point remains relevant: a reference question is rarely just about retrieving a fact. It requires understanding the question, recognising what the person actually needs, knowing where to look and judging whether the answer makes sense.

Bunny's expertise is accumulated through experience. She knows the organisation, the collection, her colleagues and the people asking the questions. That type of on-the-job learning and real life experience is difficult to automate.

Still from Desk Set (1957, directed by Walter Lang. Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox via IMDB.

The next machine

The computer wasn't the last technology to threaten librarianship.

By 2004, the threat looked rather different. Google was rapidly transforming how people searched for information. A D-Lib Magazine editorial from Bonita Wilson that year noted that anyone could now “type a few words into a Google search bar” and receive thousands of information sources ranked by Google's algorithms. It acknowledged that professional searchers, including reference librarians, might be tempted to worry about this development (Wilson, 2004).

As we know, Google did not make librarians obsolete. The work changed, libraries adapted to the new technology and learned to use it effectively, so it enhanced the work rather than replacing it.

And this is where the comparison between Desk Set and real-world librarianship becomes interesting. The film's stereotype of the librarian as a woman who knows where to find information may now seem dated. But its portrayal of the librarian as an expert, adaptable information professional has aged surprisingly well.

People and machines

Now we have AI.

AI can spit out references, facts, and even whole essays faster than any librarian could. It can answer questions in seconds and produce convincing-looking responses without requiring the user to understand how the information was found.

That makes the question asked in Desk Set feel remarkably contemporary: what happens to the librarian when the machine can do the searching?

Still from Desk Set (1957), directed by Walter Lang. Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox via IMDB.

The answer may lie in what librarians have always done when technology changes.

The profession has survived the card catalogue, the photocopier, the personal computer, the internet and Google. Some technologies have eliminated tasks. Some have changed the skills librarians need. But none has eliminated the underlying need for people who can evaluate information, understand context, exercise professional judgement and respond to what their communities actually need.

Desk Set does not challenge every stereotype about librarians. But it does challenge one of the most persistent stories told about the profession: that when a machine can perform one of our tasks, the librarian becomes obsolete.

EMERAC doesn't destroy the Reference Department. The librarians remain, and (spoiler alert) the machine becomes part of their workplace rather than the end of it.

Perhaps the real lesson of Desk Set is not that librarians will always beat the machines. It is that librarians have always been very good at finding a way to use them.

Time is a flat circle, after all.

Reference List

American Film Institute (2026) AFI Catalog. Available at: https://catalog.afi.com/Film/52153-DESK-SET (Accessed: 28/08/2026).

Desk Set (1957) Directed by Walter Lang. [Feature film]. 20th Century Fox.

Wilson, B. (2004) 'Using the Internet for Searching', D-Lib Magazine, 10(3), Available at: https://www.dlib.org/dlib/march04/03editorial.html (Accessed: 30/08/2024).

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