Mostly in terms of trivia and nonsense sharing, but anything else you can remember doing on a regular basis when you didn’t have The Web to help you.
In my case, I would buy books like Book of Lists and World Almanac and such.
There was a Joke Circuit at work where jokes and Xeroxed visual nonsense got passed around.
Also, I relied on Britannica for “important” stuff.
In other words, since around 1995 if it ain’t on The Internet, I don’t know much about it!
You?
In middle school, my friend stood in the hallway and asked people walking by to sign a petition banning dihydrogen monoxide.
For research papers, it was World Books all the way down.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
Guinness Book of World Records, Encyclopedia Britannica, Time-Life books (we had several series, including the science books).
I lived it and I can’t believe how hard it used to be to get data.
I lived in the library when I was writing papers. Encyclopedias were the ‘wikipedia’ of the day for a basic overview of topics. Then, off to specific books, often years out of date. For more recent info, I would go through magazine indexes for recent stories and then see what libraries carried back issues of those publications. Then I had to either order those magazines to my nearest library or drive over to distant libraries to access their catalogues. Plus, their hours generally sucked.
Don’t even get me started on editing papers. I can’t believe how much scholarship was completed before the internet. Pretty amazing, really.
I spent a lot of time regularly at the library taking notes. I kept lots of paper files and gravitated toward manuals and material I could bring home from work. The briefcase was as heavy as the duffel bag on the first day of school.
The library. I shudder to think how many trees I killed photocopying stuff in grad school.
I used to spend lots of time in libraries — when I moved to a new city, or even visited one on business, it was like going to the mall.
I guess I should have seen it, but I would never have predicted that having factual information at our fingertips would not lower ignorance and elevate the political discourse. Most people seem completely unable to distinguish solid facts from blatant, lying propaganda.
And I know that both sides are nodding their heads and agreeing.
It’s hard to believe, but marriage manuals (i.e., books about ‘sex’) were actually kept locked up in a glass case at the library, and not a little branch library, but our big-city library. This was in the late 50’s, early 60’s. I know, because I wondered what books were so valuable they had to be locked up, and they were all old-fashioned marriage manuals. You had to ask a librarian to unlock it and let you read it (I think they were for reference only, not to be taken out.) Point being…I had to learn the facts of life on the street! lol… If you wanted to know the words to a song on the radio, sometimes there was a (very) thin magazine on the shelves of the Rexall drugstore that was just the printed lyrics to popular songs of the day…If you wanted to know if a movie was good, you had to ask around, or you just went anyway as you were just going to see a Beach Party/Hammer horror movie/musical/Disney-ish adventure/actual Disney movie, and one was much like the previous ones. If the movie was big enough (Cleopatra, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Dirty Dozen) our local film critic had a short review in the Friday newspaper saying basically yea or nay. But tabloids and movie magazines were still full of the same old dirt as they are today, though couched in coy innuendo.
Pretty much a tie between the library and phone-a-friend. Also, if I needed a phone number I’d look it up in the phone book, and if I needed to go somewhere I looked at a paper map.
Pre-Poll Data Gathering? You’d have to go a bit before the internet to not have election night data gathering.
In the sixties, newspapers and TV networks sent people to drive to polling places as they were counting the ballots by hand. They’d get the number of ballots submitted, the number counted, and the preliminary numbers, then they’d ask nicely if they could use the phone for a reversed-charge long distance call. Of course, not every polling place would be sampled, but not every polling place is sampled now.
I know this because my parents volunteered our house as a polling place because that would give us a feeling for how our government worked. On election nights my sisters and I would fall asleep to the sound of the (mostly) women poll workers calling out their tallies.
I forget if it was one person calling (the captain)and two writing the tally marks into two tally booklets, or if the caller had a booklet, too. But as people marked, they’d call “check” or “tally,” depending on whether they were making a vertical mark of a diagonal one. The calls allerted the team to miscounts, which would need to be corrected.
Ballots were in full view of the team and may have been secondarily called by a second team member. Batches may have also been re-counted by a different team. Mostly the calls (candidate names for offices and yes/no for propositions) were too faint for me to hear from my bed, and I’d just hear the checks and tallies.
My family had the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopaedia on CD-ROM. It got updated (by buying a new disc) once a year, so the information was always fresh and accurate.
For more in-depth information, we had to go to the library, walking uphill both ways through the snow.
My brother and I used to pore over these 3 books we had. One was Leonard Maltin’s movie guide, another had cast lists and synopses of every TV show and the other listed every top 40 song ever plus blurbs about the bands.
For getting around we read the red map books of our local area.
Oh yeah and the family had a set of Funk & Wagnall’s from the grocery store.
Read The Straight Dope in hard copy. 
I lived in an area where the Chicago Reader was available, but had never picked up a copy until I had read the first book. Aside from that, the reference section of the library and bookstore.
I have a bookcase of reference books. Lotsa dictionaries of this and that – history, mythology, slang (old and new), coffee table books on things like trees and cats, guides to birds, wildflowers etc, travel guides to all kinds of places, an atlas, two history atlases, books of quotations, grammar guides. I used to consult the shelves a few times a day too.
Used to play a lot of fantasy baseball and football. Would get big books of stats before the season started; during the season, you’d pore through copies of USA Today or The Sporting News at the library.
Finding out sports scores was often agonizing, especially for a somewhat obscure college basketball team I like. They were never in the Top 25 in those days, so their score didn’t automatically appear on the bottom of ESPN at 28 and 58 minutes past the hour. (This was before ESPN had the continuously-running scores on the bottom.) On rare occasions, ESPN would show other scores during a timeout or halftime of a game they were airing. If not, I had to wait until the 10:00 local news to see how my team did. (The team was of local interest because they’re in the same conference as the hometown team.) Sometimes I’d even have to wait until the paper arrived the next day if I missed the 10:00 news.
Then in the mid 90s, Headline News started running a continuous crawl on the bottom showing nothing but sports scores, so I could check my team’s score every so often. The problem was they’d frequently cut to a commercial before my team’s score was shown, so I wouldn’t get another chance to see the score for another 20 minutes or so. (The scrolling didn’t stop just because a commercial came on.)
Once in a while when I don’t have internet access, I have to rely on ESPN’s Bottom Line. This is just as agonizing as the bygone Headline News sports ticker. They waste way too much time showing statistics for individual players, etc.
Hustler and Club magazines.
The public library.
The main public library downtown.
University libraries.
The Library of Congress (I live near Washington, DC).
OCLC.
My mom picked up a volume of the children’s Golden Book Encyclopedia every month at the grocery store when I was around 10. Does anyone remember them. I waited EAGERLY for each volume and practically memorized them all. Later we had a set of hardcover encyclopedias (that cost $150 total!!!) which we also practically memorized. So today we are trivial pursuit champs and can dredge up odd facts at will. (This, and $1.25, will buy us a cup of coffee, all that knowledge never advanced our lives in any meaningful way.)