dewey decimal or oracular vernacular

Before the advent and propagation of the internet and search machines, the inquiring public relied on certain institutions and librarians in particular for answers.

I do hope that there still are such venerable human experts—at least, the trained and the willing that are still there to field inquiries and riddled with such questions, like Mental-Floss shares a cache recently uncovered in the New York public library system. It seems that librarians jotted down the questions they found either humourous or very challenging, and I would wager that there are similar repositories to be found in libraries the world around. I remember well when librarians were mysterious oracles and when browsing the stacks lent a way of formulating a question that had been asked, in some form, before. Seeing these notes is certainly an interesting juxtaposition to allowing predictive software finish one’s sentence, where is, what is, how do I...