HOLLYWOOD — Eunice Gastelum, who spent forty years as the librarian of this newspaper’s clipping morgue and the rest of her life as its unpaid oracle, died July 14 at her home in Atwater Village. She was 96.

Her domain was the basement: rows of green filing cabinets stuffed with envelopes, each envelope stuffed with clippings, each clipping cut by hand with a bone folder she inherited from her predecessor, a man named Emil Draxler who trained her in 1954 and whose system she kept, amended, and eventually transformed into something no one else fully understood.

The system’s logic was her own. Stories were filed not under what they were about but under what a reporter would remember about them years later. A 1967 fire at a costume warehouse lived under SMOKE, DAMAGE, SENTIMENTAL, because that was the phrase in the lede. A councilman’s forgotten scandal was findable under UMBRELLAS. Reporters would descend the stairs with half a memory — something about a parrot, maybe 1972? — and come back up ten minutes later holding the envelope.

“You didn’t ask Eunice for a file,” said Desmond Rourke, the paper’s editor. “You described a feeling you had about a story, and she handed you the feeling, clipped and dated.”

Mrs. Gastelum was born in 1929 in Boyle Heights and came to the Times at 24, hired as a clerk on the strength, she later said, of being the only applicant who did not smoke near the paper. When Mr. Draxler retired in 1961 she took the morgue, and when the building flooded in 1980 she was found at 2 a.m. moving the oldest cabinets to higher ground by herself, having taken the bus in. She retired in 1994, the same year the paper’s technology columnist declared the Internet a fad; she disagreed with him in a memo that the newsroom framed considerably later than it should have.

Retirement was partial. For three decades the paper phoned her at home whenever the basement defeated it, and she answered with cabinet and drawer numbers the way other people recall birthdays. The digitization project now working through the archive relies on eleven spiral notebooks of her margin notes, which the current librarian describes as “the only map of the territory.”

She is survived by her daughter, Teresa, of Glendale; two grandsons; and a great-granddaughter, born in March, whom she filed, in the last notebook, under GOOD NEWS, FINALLY.

Her daughter said the family asked her once, near the end, whether the system should simply be explained to someone, written down start to finish. She considered it, her daughter said, and replied that it was written down — all of it, in the files, if you knew where to look.