I was a Science Reference Librarian at John Crerar Library in Chicago in the early 70's, and this sounds very familiar, although we tended to get a slightly more focused set of questions (and our boss Mr. Quinn was much more pleasant!). I love Wikipedia, but the books in our Reference Collection were remarkable.
I can remember the days! I suppose as problems grow in size, it's not too surprising that older methods of coping with what seemed like lots of data are still applicable.
A friend of mine wrote a book about what happened in Germany: Scientists under Hitler : politics and the physics community in the Third Reich by Alan Beyerchen. I'm about a third of the way through it, but they mixed politics with the physical sciences to a remarkable degree, driving away many of the best people and isolating German scientists.
PostScript's magic is subtle. I once tried writing a PostScript interpreter in ADA. Got far enough to display the turkey example and realized that PostScript code can modify itself and decided I didn't want to go there.
I started programming in college in the late 60's and it was cards up until the mid 70's when I got access to a PDP-10 with TECO as an editor. Online editing made longer and more ambitious programs much more feasible. Cards were sort of neat, though.
I remember the Apollo reps moaning that the speed of Motorola's 68k chips weren't keeping up the the x86. I still have an Apollo motheroard with two 68k chips on it -- a work around to enable virtual memory.
Back in the day I worked quite a bit with Knuth's early SAIL (an extended Algol on the PDP-10) implementation of Metafont. They could have used some of the documentation the later WEB versions had as he tended to get tricky with squeezing everything out of the 36-bit words (which I was porting to a 32-bit word machine). But the code was an education and a joy to read well before he polished it for publication.
I read my first Fortran manual about 1964 (my father was an engineer), but didn't have access to a computer until college in '65/'66. I always had my choice of languages, so I've used a couple dozen fairly seriously, including SAIL, BLISS, Metafont, Tex, Forth, APL, Fortran, C, Java, Python. Now it's just recreational programming when I get the itch, e.g. hand coding a string package in WASM.
Having done some production assembler coding in the late 70's, I expect most new assembler work is now done more for fun than by necessity. Unless the code is well commented and laid out, working with existing assembler code can be very difficult.
That said, I've been experimenting using the m4 macro language to make Web Assembly (WASM) a little easier to use. WASM is a well thought out language and a number of people are doing some hand coding in it.
You might try worldcat.org (most books as cataloged by libraries are there). Just tried my home town (village in NY state) and the results looked pretty good. Easy to just look at just fiction, biography, etc.
Disclaimer: I worked at the host organization (OCLC) for most of my life, much of it related to WorldCat.
Those were good times. I got a copy of the SAIL Metafont and managed to port it to Tandem's TAL language (rather like BLISS, but stack oriented on a 16/32-bit machine). There was some serious bit-twiddling in the code using every bit of every 36-bit word!
Working with TeX (thankfully the Pascal version), we spent lots of time doing DVI implementations for various devices. Are virtual fonts still a thing?
Our research group used Apollo's for several years and the feeling that they were all one big system (which never failed) was wonderful. Not being pure Unix was the main drawback.