When Ronald Reagan was elected President, there were few computers, there was no internet. m How would I an independent layperson go about learning more about ongoings that weren't typically represented in broadcast media?
For example how would I go about learning more about Reagan and Carter's backgrounds during the election if I wanted to?
Libraries could certainly provide all sorts of information about things that had been published in books, but publication takes a long time, was that the best I could do in 1980 for up to date layperson research?
Being that I am old enough to have gone through college prior to the creation of the World Wide Web, major libraries had access to online databases with fairly recent research materiel and literally racks and racks of scholarly publications and magazines. While they did not have the luxury of the wide and instant access that we enjoy today, timely and exhaustive research was available. Actual printed resources were much more available and detailed since they couldn't just refer you to their website for more information. An additional benefit of researching back then was that you rarely had to weed out highly questionable sources. Bad sources still existed but you were normally looking at peer reviewed articles.
About that time, I was doing research, for a paper in college. I hit the library and card catalogs. Read books and made notes.
If there were not enough biographical informations in the books, and for the subjects you describe, somebody might use the "Reader's Guide" to access the more obscure periodicals, maybe write a letter to someone, or make some phone calls.