change-registry oder encyclopedia brown

I remember when, in some date-stamped recollections, when a school assignment required research in actual books and was a tethered affair. Once I was asked to produce a sort of newspaper—not an annual review or compilation of events but an an actual daily covering some chosen date from the Middle Ages. I found the gaps absolutely immense, without a more liberal deadline for creating this anachronism, which I was probably making tougher than it was supposed to be, not content to focus on a single coronation or day on the battlefield. The copy and the images came from a vintage edition of encyclopedias, I remember, with a lot of manual cutting and pasting, aligning images with copy.
I wonder if such tasks were more original, if viewed from above, or resulted in the same degree of copypasta as might such homework deliver today. Books in the Reference Section were those that did not leave the Library. Wikipedia is a very fine thing but there is something to be said for the ability to thumb through a tome whose relevance is arranged according to the editors' plans. Later, we had a contemporary edition of Funk & Wagnall's that somewhat supplanted the older set and I knew classmates had an embarrassment of variety from various publishers and encyclopedists. A 1937 edition of a fine German sits on the shelf of furnished apartment, mostly as decoration I suppose, which I look through from time to time. I never thought of an encyclopedia as propaganda or as a snap-shot in time, even though I always relied on vintage editions myself.
The altas volume had some particular interesting insights concerning the direction of the German Reich, including the migration of the Germans, immigrant saturation and new naming-conventions. Though such compositions exist as chronologies and as the snap-shot I struggled to create, I wonder what it means in terms of research and originality that there's an easy footnote and method to cull a periodical.