A lot of text adventures do this. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, was essentially an in-game search engine that the player had to refer to constantly to fingure things out, and I think it worked beautifully. I can think of a number of freeware text adventures in which the player progressively receives access to reference books. You type "look up X in Y" to find the useful information. (e.g. "Look up MANDRAKE in HERBALIST'S HANDBOOK.")
I can't think of any graphical adventures that has anything like this. Usually, you click on a bookshelf, and the character instinctively grabs a particular book, flips to the most relevant page(s) and shows you a block of text that maybe comes in handy. It would be better, I think, if the game would ask you "what would you like to look up?" when you click on the bookshelf. Then you actually have to do some thinking about the plot of the game instead of relying on the protagonist's bibliomancy skills.
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