The several paragraphs before and after this statement are much more salient and profound. E.G. the following paragraph:
But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?
Reference areas were (and some still are) situated near tremendous libraries of reference books (like Encyclopedias, telephone directories, almanacs, etc.) and those were usually sufficient to address many of the types of questions the author lists. If you ever go to a rare book library, like the Lilly at Indiana University, the Beinecke at Yale, etc. (which you can visit for free!), the old school rare books librarians are still adept at using their reference books to answer questions pertaining to their trade. Those reference books are also highly sought after by said librarians and other book collectors.
But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?