Tedious: feminized labor in machine-readable cataloging

Abstract

This essay examines previously unexplored IBM reports and manuals that document the development of Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) in the 1960s to understand gendered assumptions manufacturers made about the labor of information retrieval and to ultimately discuss the ways in which MARC transformed the feminized labor of information, making it more diffuse and shifting expectations about productivity. In the process, this essay will show that cataloging, like other forms of women's labor transformed by technology in the latter part of the twentieth century, has a complicated relationship to the market labor and industrialization. Finally, this essay ends by connecting MARC and feminized labor to the contemporary discussion of BIBFRAME.

Bodies, Brains, and Machines: An Exploration of the Relationship between the Material and Affective States of Librarians and Information Systems

“…The connection between women's bodies and information processing is further traced through an analysis of the 1957 film Desk Set. While the film has frequently been an object of study in relation to women and early computer technology in libraries (Colatrella 2001, Malone, 2002Keilty, 2018) there has been less focus on the material conditions of technology and the bodies and affective circumstances of the female librarians in the film.…”