We’ve added a new item to the menu bar on the Low Tech Institute’s website, namely a library of resources. Many of these titles are available to anybody with internet access while some of them are physical books available to those who can visit the institute. We’ve got over a hundred entries right now, but this will grow as we encounter more resources.
The items are organized into broad, over-arching categories: feed, clothe, house, transport, and general references. Each of these are divided into more specific subheadings; “feed,” for example contains such subheadings as water, plants, animals, infrastructure, processing, preservation, and preparation. And in turn, these subheadings are further divided. “Plants,” for example, is divided into garden, orchard/bush, and mushrooms (and yes, we know mushrooms are fungi, but they are functionally similar to plants for our purposes).
Types of Resources
The library is predominantly made up of formally published materials from books that have been made into PDFs. Although we do provide some links to web resources, we are trying to limit this to things that are best experienced online, such as a solar calculator. This is not meant as a critique of online-only resources. At this point, it is out of caution that we have not added all of our favorite instructional YouTube clips and blogs: there are just too many out there. We are relying on the vetting process through which formal publications must go.
The resources are all identified with self-explanatory tags: [PDF], [BOOK], [WEB], [VIDEO], and so on. In addition, they author and date are listed after the title.
We do not host copyrighted materials. Many of the resources are open-access, publicly available, or out of copyright. Any links to publications under copyright are simply directing you to other websites that host this material. We are not lawyers and do not know the implications of their choice to host these materials, but while they are publicly listed, we’ll provide links to them.
Please Help
This represents just the beginning of a resource that should continue to grow. We have a few hundred more resources to list here, but we could use your help. Do you know of good resources for any of the listed categories? Do you have a suggestion for another category we neglected to consider? Please let us know.