Of the reference interview

Traditionally, the use of the library was heavily dependent on a librarian being able to aid the patron in decoding paper indexes and various other bibliographic resources. Over the past 10-15 years the services originally found in such paper indexes have been supplanted with electronic databases, which are available to anyone at a library that has access to a computer. Additionally, these electronic resources are used outside of the guiding help of a librarian or instructor.
My question is: how are these electronic resources helping information literacy? Students increasingly view themselves as being "tech-savvy" but what happens when a student navigates to a sophisticated database such as Web of Science or Emerald and has no luck finding what it is they are after? What happens when these students become frustrated and rely on EBSCO for all of their information needs? When going online to use library resources patrons are left on their own to figure things out, i.e. there is no form of the reference interview. Is this a problem? How do we fix it?