Many years ago...no, make that many, many years ago...if I wanted a piece of information, I would go to my trusty set of encyclopaedia. There they sat in their red leather-backed glory, taking up 75cm of space in my already full bookcase and, within a minute, I usually had my answer... and then got waylaid by perusing the other interesting but unconnected facts on the page. Archaic? Yes, but it worked.