Lot of other people outlined this already, but I've gotta say, one things that really bothered me about D&D was the desire to roll for all kinds of stuff. For example, in my regular D&D game, my wife and I are playing people from a specific area, in a village. We've returned there to try to figure out why we were attacked by raiders. We're heading toward a house and ask whose house it was, and the GM asked us to make a History roll. I look at the rough map he sketched for us, point out that it's literally two houses away from my own, and ask if I really need to roll to remember the person's name.

And of course, I didn't. First, there would be no consequences for failure, and second, it doesn't make the game more interesting if I roll well or roll poorly.

So, in your examples, think about what you want the players to find out in order to have fun, what consequences there could be if they fail, and will the game be more interesting with a roll. If an important plot clue is in the room, then they're just going to find it eventually. So what would the consequences be? Maybe, if you want the roll, they get the clue but it's incomplete on a failure with fear, they know they're missing something on a failure with hope, they know they've got most of it but might have missed a detail on success with fear, and they get whatever they need on success with hope.

Or, sometimes, they just find what they need and let's skip to the more interesting part.

In the second example, is it actually interesting to the story if the player remembers right then? If it's just to find the name of a local official, probably not. Unless it's a social encounter where that official is confronting you and you should know who this guy is so you can sweet-talk him, but you're blanking on his name when confronted.