They had
a wonderful subject index, like an old card index, I would go to that and I'd look up robots, or ghosts, or something, and it would list all the books they had, all the fiction works they had with robots or ghosts or whatever, and I would go and read them.
I've just returned fresh from a research leave where amongst other things I investigated the challenges and possibilities around creating a Canadian
subject based research tool that does for Canadian Journals what the
wonderful Current
Index to Legal Periodicals does for US journals.