[californiadreem]

>Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town.

The issue with this type of thinking is that it assumes some level of material surplus before those books are both physically and intellectually lost to future generations.

A societal collapse already implies a critical level of material scarcity that would make information or industrial preservation low on the totem pole. Where are you going to get the raw and human resources to maintain what remains let alone rebuild industrial processes? And what if those "human resources" don't want to rebuild?

The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart has a pretty candid take on what would happen if an academic survived a systemic collapse of the United States and tried to rebuild the Old World from what was left of the survivors. I think Stewart's vision is extremely plausible, even with the advent of the Internet and digital storage, possibly more so.