I worked for an older film post facility, and their audio library was a very interesting place to kill time on breaks. There was a room that was 20'+ long with floor to ceiling shelving with 12" vinyl records. There were a couple of 1200s for sampling the needle drops. There was a pad with an order form where you manually recorded the vinyl's ID and the cut number used. This was then faxed to licensing department, and they would fax back an approved license terms. This was for SFX as well as music cuts. There was a much smaller shelving section of CDs with some of the same content but mainly newer content. Now, it's all online. We also had a library of film/video stock footage. This library was mainly 1" tapes and consisted primarily of footage shot on 35mm film. This took up soooo much space. By the time the world switched to HD, the internet was able to provide video content as well, so that library really never improved other than the odd BCSP or the rare DigiBeta masters of the newest content.

So, it brings back lots of memories seeing something like this. I couldn't imagine having to deal with finding audio cuts on a reel-to-reel Nagra type system. At least with vinyl, you can see the cuts, and CDs just let you skip directly to cut 87 (if you still could find the remote). Maybe there are cue tones that allow a system to scan directly to the cut???