CORRESPONDENT ELAINE RIVERA had a problem. She needed to talk to people who knew six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, a victim of child abuse, whose death in New York City became a symbol of America's deeply flawed child-welfare system. Under deadline pressure, Rivera needed to move quickly, so she turned for help to TIME's in-house research center. Using a CD-ROM directory, the staff was able to supply Rivera with a list of people who live in Izquierdo's apartment building. The results of her interviews appeared in last week's cover story.

Hardly a week goes by without some fact gathered, some nugget of data gleaned or some key piece of reporting made possible by research-center librarians and their computer databases. For a story on Haiti's upcoming elections, for example, center staff members faxed and E-mailed a background briefing to Miami correspondent Tammerlin Drummond.

The names of the librarians--Angela Thornton, Sandra Jamison, Joan Levinstein, AnnMarie Bonardi and Angela Azzolino--don't appear on top or at the bottom of the stories they work on, but their influence is often keenly felt. "I see our fingerprints in every magazine," says Lynn Dombek, assistant director of the library, who created the center two years ago and last week named Thornton to replace her as head of staff.

The new center supplants a charming if antiquated system of information retrieval and delivery that included "markers" clipping daily newspapers and filing them by keywords and names. The new center--a branch of the larger Time Inc. library system--is largely computer driven, providing access to a wealth of online databanks, from services like Nexis and Dialog to the Internet. Says Thornton: "There's been a revolutionary change in the way we gather and deliver information."

Computers have not replaced the human touch in TIME's research--that spark of humor, that willingness to make the extra effort. Time Chronicles editor Bruce Handy delights in using Nexis to track quirky statistical trends, such as last week's chart of the popularity of various presidential adjectives. (Clintonian, with 536 citations over 15 years, edged out Reaganesque, with 473). "I've never heard anyone at the center admit defeat," says Chicago bureau chief James Graff, a devoted fan. "Last month we requested information on a drug bust, date unknown, in the Chicago suburb of Hanover Park. The faxes on that arrived Thanksgiving morning."