Several football seasons ago a young man from out of town got one of our research librarians on the phone. The caller was embarrassed and troubled. It was Saturday morning. He had two tickets for the Army-Notre Dame game that afternoon, and a date with a beautiful girl. But he could not for the life of him remember her name. He did know, though, that TIME had once run a photograph of the young lady's aunt thumbing her nose at the camera. If the photograph could be found, he would have his date's last name. The TIME librarian located the picture, passed on the information--and as far as we know, the young man and his girl enjoyed the game.

This odd request illustrates the versatility expected of our research librarians. There are 18 of them (14 women, four men) in TIME Inc.'s Morgue (i.e., library of essential information). All are college graduates and graduate librarians. Their operation has been an important part of TIME'S editorial process since about 1937. By then our morgue had become so large and complex that the editorial researchers needed help in selecting from it the background material, facts and information they used for swift and accurate checking.

TIME'S morgue has been 27 years abuilding and today includes some 33,000 reference books, 500,000 folders of biographical, historical, business and otherwise usefully classified information, and 50,000 periodicals. Finding your way around quickly among this mass of material demands patience, imagination and a real knowledge of the resources of the morgue. To help matters, each research librarian is a specialist in a specific field. He or she works closely with the editorial staff in these fields and attends story conferences to help out on two basic jobs: 1) selecting morgue material requested when stories are in the making; 2) helping the editorial researchers find the sources for checking their facts after stories are written.

Each month the research librarians answer about 5,000 requests for facts and background material. Some of them are one-of-a-kinds: How much does the U.S. budget weigh? What is a sneeze? Was Julius Caesar a good swimmer? Did Shakespeare wear a nightgown? How much money was bet at U.S. race tracks on Memorial Day, 1948?

But the bulk of the research librarian's work is done on stories like TIME'S cover on New York City's Mayor O'Dwyer. After receiving the 30 folders on O'Dwyer, the researcher called for everything on New York City. Told that that would mean some 800 folders, 50 books, and innumerable magazine articles, she revised her request somewhat. The research librarian selected a group of books he thought would be most valuable, sent along a batch of folders on finance, government, industries, etc., added some selected material from the periodicals file. As the story progressed, checking points inevitably arose on which the researcher needed specific information : the number of banks, art galleries, insurance companies, etc. Some of the figures were hard to nail down. But the end result was in paragraphs like the following :

"It is the world's greatest port . . . the world's greatest manufacturing city and the world's greatest marketplace . . . both bees and locomotives are on sale within a stone's throw of City Hall."

A barometer of the ebb & flow of news, TIME'S morgue needs constant pruning. For example, the Marshall Plan has zoomed from no folders in 1947 to about 225 today; Harry Truman from nine in 1944 to 288, Atomic Energy from two to 358. But these folders (like all others) must be vigorously culled -- for the work of the research librarians and our other morguists (there are 50 in all) would be severely handicapped if the morgue were left to sprout at will.

And the work of all the rest of us would be severely handicapped without the morgue. As a TIME morgue-user said recently, "The name, 'The Morgue,' is an ancient and honorable misnomer. The place ought to be called 'The Incubator.' "

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