It is Giles' particular gift to cast a glamour over the kind of dogged reference we practice daily. He invests the methodical search for the fact that will solve the problem at hand with a kind of fierce joy, but he never underestimates its cost in time or care. Get my books. Look stuff up. I'm sure he will.
Books are central.
It is in books that Giles, as the Watcher, finds the images, the information, the incantation, the lore that will assist Buffy in her struggle against the Hellmouth and its universe of monsters. While Giles relies upon Willow to search the internet for materials, like newspaper records and police logs, not easily accessible in print, Giles believes that what he needs to know for Buffy's sake lies in his many volumes at home and at work. Sometimes that means literal translation, other times it means recasting what he reads into stories, or tag lines, or aphorisms that make sense to the teens he serves. The sacredness of the book, the literal power of words, underscore the action in Buffy's world. He's like SuperLibrarian.