I must be missing the concept here. Does anyone have any tips on this?

To me it appears that content management exists of "blending" the assets from one file with those in another thus building one huge .blend file that I pull assets from as necessary; provided it doesn't become so large my machine dies.

I assume my workflow is faulty. Example: I built a back alley scene to reflect the one behind my building. It contains 6 different garbage bins for the various types of waste and waste pickup. It also contains 4 different types of recycling bin and 3 types of trash can. A lot of these items; such as the recycling bins, come in more than one colour and the large garbage bins have different decals to denote the various trucking companies that collect them.

Now, my problem. I finished the scene and rendered it. Now, I simply want to save an asset collection of Waste Disposal Items that I may use in other projects at a later time. The workflow as I understand it is to save a .blend file with all my assets in a row, replicated with the different textures I have prepared for them. Give the .blend a good name like Waste Disposal Items, save it and call it a day. Now if I want a specific waste bin I load them all; unless I broke the whole thing down into more concise .blends with all implementations of any given bin in each .blend file. 

I'm an old guy. My mind wanders. I can't remember every itteration of every garbage can and what the heck I may have named them. Is there no way to see assets, in a group, without loading them first; and viewing them second? A complete waste of time suitable for one of the bins recently modeled.

Now if one of those bins should come in either aluminum or plastic, with or without scratches; my mind gets ready to explode. I have discovered Material Library VX. It appears to reinforce my bad workflow by only allowing me to save a material without any visual representation. I have lots of metal and plastic materials I've "saved for a later date." Right. Some cat named Fake User made sure that wasn't happening. I have him tamed now but that doesn't tell me just what "metal" is in a material till I load it.

I'm a visual kind of guy. Despite the thickness of the current lenses I would still prefer to see the materials I save and load in a visiual representation, if possible; without either loading a dozen different metal textures one at a time and removing them with Material Library VX till I find the one I want to apply to a bloody waste bin. Yep. Blood splattered alley way. Remember the decals above?

So; you get the drift of what I'm on here. Is there any way to visually peruse assets. Models, materials, and the like without loading a pile of .blend files looking for particular items or node arrangements?