site user guide

A guide to finding what you want on libcom, and navigating the site.

Submitted by Jacques Roux on September 28, 2006

There are many of ways to find what you are looking for on libcom.org.

Generally speaking the majority of site content can be found in the main sections which are listed in the dark grey bar at the top of the page. These are explained in detail in our guide to our sections.

Information about the site can be found in notes, linked from the footer.

Information about you (if you have registered) is under 'My account'.

Other useful tools are our categories, which include regions, sectors and tags. You can read more about these in our categories guide.

Perhaps most usefully, you can use the search box at the top-right of the page, or why not install our Firefox search plug-in so you can search direct from your browser. You can also search from here.

Comments

phil98

8 months ago

Submitted by phil98 on July 28, 2023

I’m looking for a place to get some constructive criticism for material I’ve written.

Specifically I’ve been adapting some manuals on subjects like "Social Defense" for anarchists to experiment with.

Is LibCom the right place for that, if so, how should I proceed?

Submitted by Steven. on July 31, 2023

phil98 wrote: I’m looking for a place to get some constructive criticism for material I’ve written.

Specifically I’ve been adapting some manuals on subjects like "Social Defense" for anarchists to experiment with.

Is LibCom the right place for that, if so, how should I proceed?

You are welcome to Post articles to the site, which people can then comment on

How to use the libcom library

The libcom library contains over 10,000 articles. If it's your first time on the site, or you're looking for something specific, it can be difficult to know where to start. Luckily, there's a range of ways you can filter the library content to suit your needs, from casual browsing to researching a particular topic.

Submitted by Joseph Kay on November 14, 2010

Casual browsing

Every article is tagged with relevant keywords. Clicking on these will take you to a chronological list of all the content with that keyword, with the most recent at the top. So if you're reading a biographical article and click on the 'biographies' tag, you'll be taken to a list of all the biographical content on libcom.

Beneath each article there is also a list of five related articles under the heading 'More like this'. This is based on all the tags on the article, comparing them with other articles. It's a great first port of call if you're looking for something similar to what you've just read. And of course any article you click through to will also have its own 'more like this' recommendations.

The library index

The starting page for navigating the library is the library index. This page shows a chronological list of the latest library content, with the most recently added at the top. At the top right of the site is a search bar, which can be used to search the library (once your results come up, you can filter by 'library' using the controls in the right hand column). But also, you'll notice five other tabs, which contain powerful ways to search the library content.

Authors, people and groups
The authors tab, as the name suggests, allows you to search through the library by author. This includes individual authors and groups. Articles are also labelled with authors if they are about the person or group, as well as if they were written by them. This is very helpful if you know what you're looking for, or even for casual browsing keeping an eye out for interesting-sounding groups or names you recognise. The first thing you'll see is a short list of featured authors, but if you click on 'index' you can navigate an A-Z list of all the authors in the libcom library.

Sectors
The sectors tab allows you to navigate content by industrial sector. If you're looking for content on a particular industry, this is a great place to start.

Tags
The tags tab contains a list of featured tags, and clicking on 'index' opens up an A-Z index of all the tags on the site. If you're looking for something specific, this is a good way to narrow down your results.

Map
The map tab does what it says on the tin: all library content is overlaid onto an interactive Google map. The box above allows you to filter the content by tag, so for example entering 'strikes' would show all the library content about strikes on the map.

Bookmarked
Finally, the bookmarked tab shows popular content that other users have bookmarked. You can bookmark library articles yourself by clicking the 'bookmark this' link at the bottom of each article. You can find your bookmarked articles via the 'my account' link on the menu at the top of every page.


We hope you find this guide useful. Any comments, questions or feedback can be posted in the feedback forum. The libcom library is an ever-expanding resource and we're keen to make it as useful and accessible as possible.

Comments

Using e-book readers or kindles with libcom.org

A guide for making the most of libcom.org for users who own e-book readers/kindles/tablet computers etc.

Submitted by Steven. on February 11, 2012

E-readers or kindles can be a great way of reading, especially long texts, off-line.

Some of our articles are already in e-book formats suitable for e-readers. Check out our PDFs, epub and mobi file archives.

It is easy to put articles and texts from libcom.org onto your e-book reader, by following these 3 simple steps.

1a. Simply copy the text in your internet browser (such as Internet Explorer or Google Chrome) from the article title to the end, and paste it into a blank document in a word processor program, such as Microsoft Word.

1b. For PDF files go straight to step 2.

2. Save the document to your computer.

3. Upload the document to a free e-book reader conversion website, like www.2epub.com (or put it into a free conversion program like Calibre) and choose the kind of e-book file you want to turn it into (such as .epub or .mobi for kindles).

Comments

flaneur

12 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by flaneur on February 16, 2012

Calibre is a good progam for convert multiple texts.

Steven.

12 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on February 16, 2012

Can you legitimately download that free anywhere? If so we should link to it

Spassmaschine

12 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spassmaschine on March 12, 2012

might be worth adding links to pdf and mobi tag achives in the guide above?

jolasmo

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jolasmo on October 22, 2012

So I recently came across "Push To Kindle", which sends web pages to your kindle with a couple of clicks. It comes as a browser extension for Firefox/Safari/Chrome, an Android app, or a "bookmarklet". I've been using it for a few weeks to grab articles off libcom, and it's pretty sick. Anyway you can get it here:

http://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/

~J.

Steven.

11 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on October 22, 2012

That looks great: I'll give it a go

Agent of the I…

10 years 7 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Agent of the I… on August 6, 2013

Just got a Nook HD+ which was on sale for 150 bucks. How do I get my files (mostly pdfs) on it without having to upload it all one by one via libcom.org? Should I put it all in a cloud service like Windows Skydrive?

Steven.

10 years 7 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on August 7, 2013

Do you have them already on your computer? If so you should just be able to drag and drop them all

Agent of the I…

10 years 7 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Agent of the I… on August 7, 2013

You mean by hooking it to the computer with a usb wire? I haven't tried that yet. Hope stores in the nook memory. I tried skydrive cloud, they were not allowed to transfer to the internal storage. Instead to access them, i have to have be connected to the server all of the time. Which sucks.

Agent of the I…

10 years 7 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Agent of the I… on August 7, 2013

I got it. Doing it through the computer worked.

Juan Conatz

10 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Juan Conatz on October 14, 2013

Ok, so here's a problem I've been coming across. How do I make footnotes work? I've been taking some longer texts off libcom, copy and pasting them into an Open Office text document, and then converting them to mobi, but the footnotes open up the browser on the Kindle, instead of going to the footnote within the text. Please tell me there's a way to do this that doesn't involve reformatting the entire damn article from scratch...

KHM

10 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by KHM on October 15, 2013

Juan Conatz

Ok, so here's a problem I've been coming across. How do I make footnotes work? I've been taking some longer texts off libcom, copy and pasting them into an Open Office text document, and then converting them to mobi, but the footnotes open up the browser on the Kindle, instead of going to the footnote within the text. Please tell me there's a way to do this that doesn't involve reformatting the entire damn article from scratch...

Copy and paste the text into a Sigil document (epub file). Switch to code view by double clicking on the tab of the document. CTRL+F -- find and replace, removing the link given on any footnote up to but not including the #. All the footnotes should then work. If they don't, make sure the footnotes have id tags and not name tags.