The current generation however will struggle: there won't be an Internet, so all the information will be in paper books. And finding what you want when presented with a library without a paper catalog ... there's a whole bunch of people needed to rebuild indexes that had moved online.
I'm confident that small numbers of people can survive with the resources available. Maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands in total, in medium-sized groups on fertile land and in good climates. But I don't think rebooting to 21st century technology would be possible inside hundreds of years.
Isn’t the Dewey decimal system universal so that the same book will have the same reference no matter which library it’s in? So all it would take is one analog index somewhere and it would apply to every library.
Even without it, there are sections that are labeled in libraries that require no index.
The current generation however will struggle: there won't be an Internet, so all the information will be in paper books. And finding what you want when presented with a library without a paper catalog ... there's a whole bunch of people needed to rebuild indexes that had moved online.
I'm confident that small numbers of people can survive with the resources available. Maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands in total, in medium-sized groups on fertile land and in good climates. But I don't think rebooting to 21st century technology would be possible inside hundreds of years.