Archive of various manuals and documents over the last century preserved to assist in self-sufficiency:
http://www.survivorlibrary.com/?page_id=1014
The site's owner wants to preserve information in case the world goes "off-line".
I'm reading the 1911 Boy Scouts handbook. It's nearly a thousand pages. Will need a truckload of acid-free paper. :)
Thanks for this link harrygunner, days upon days of reading, You're definitely right about the paper, the printer hates me!!
I occasionally watch episodes of a show called "Life Below Zero". Cool how the Inupiaq Eskimo teach their children, keeping those skills alive.
My parents weren't interested in the methods I remember seeing as a child while visiting grand parents. Things my grandparents knew were lost in a generation.
Old methods, like storing information on paper have obviously stood the test of time. New technology has great advantages but is vulnerable.
I've thought about how neither new nor old watch technology works well if things go bad. I have three battery powered watches and two automatic, mechanical watches. The quartz watches are accurate, but would quickly become useless. The mechanical watch drift rates would ultimately lead to wide error bands.
On the other hand, time may lose its significance, devolving in importance to the level it had a few hundred years ago.