Yes indeed. Libraries. Walking around the stacks looking for books in college and not necessarily knowing what would be in the book other than what was briefly described by the card catalog. You couldn't wikipedia a topic, so you had to really know how to scan a books contents and decide if it was worth the time to read. It was such a huge time commitment to learn anything at all from books back then. I love learning but I don't think that books/libraries were a better way to find information than the internet is. Every book should be digitized in my opinion.
Interestingly the internet (and computers in general) has made libraries better as well. I can search for pretty much any book using my local library's website, click a button and have it available within a few days for pickup at my local branch. The library will send me email reminders and will auto-renew books a number of times when they are about to come due.
We had bibliographies and reviews even before the internet. Back then you filled in your interlibrary loan request, the library would sent it out to its correspondence libraries, and only within a few days the postcard would come, telling you that your book was available for pickup.
That said, bibliographic databases have been around since computers. They were just restricted to librarians, mostly because of infrastructure issues.
