About
About America's School Trust Library
America's School Trust Library is a working library for the school trust lands — the 77 million acres set aside, beginning in 1785, to fund public education in perpetuity.
Corporate record
America's School Trust Library is an Oregon nonprofit public benefit corporation. Its Articles of Incorporation were e-filed on July 21, 2026 — Oregon Registry No. 259005891. The federal tax-exemption application has been filed; no determination has been issued.
A volunteer board of directors governs the Library — no owners, no shareholders, no voting members. Governing documents: Governance.
The board
Founded the Library in 2026, after the record of one state's school-land promise turned out to be scattered — and every other state's scattered just as badly. Twenty-five years teaching information systems at Oregon State University's College of Business, where he holds an emeritus appointment; before that, a finance manager at Tektronix. He is also president of Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands — a separate advocacy organization, and a dual role he discloses and sits out of whenever the two have business with each other.
Founded four Oregon companies across fifty years — accounting software for CPA firms in 1978; three personal-computer stores through the 1980s; Evergreen Technologies, a microprocessor-upgrade manufacturer he ran from a garage start to a subsidiary in England; and Belle Vallee Cellars, a Corvallis winery, until 2012. Mathematics and computer science at Western Washington State University, 1975. He coached academic and local startups as an executive in residence at the Oregon State University Accelerator until 2018. He and Dave Sullivan cofounded the Corvallis PC Club in the 1980s and have been friends since.
A professor of competitive strategy at Oregon State University. He has also taught strategy in graduate programs at universities in Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Portraits and records of the people who founded and advise the Library: the Founders' Cabinet.
Who the Library works with
On August 10, 2026 the board of Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands voted 3–0 to establish a non-exclusive alliance with the Library — limited to information, education, and preservation, and carrying no control, no agency, no financial obligation, and no litigation position on either side. Either board may end it at any time. OASTL is the advocacy organization Dave Sullivan also serves as president; he disclosed the dual role and sat out the vote. The Library's own board has not yet acted on it; the organizational record will carry that action when it happens.
What the alliance means in practice is that the Library expects to hold Oregon's school-trust record — including the Elliott State Forest material — on exactly the terms it holds anything else: catalogued without regard to whose argument it helps, free to every reader, corrected in public, and open to a reader who disagrees with every word OASTL has ever written. Keeping a document is not endorsing it. The Library takes no position in any case or campaign, and its Constitution forbids control by any advocacy organization — including that one. An alliance that could change what the shelves say would not be worth having, to either side.
More on the founder's dual role: Independence.
The Library's day-to-day building — cataloging, drafting, design, the back-end — is carried out in partnership with Claude, an AI system, under the direction of the Library's named human editors. No machine exercises final editorial authority, and no machine holds a corporate office or a seat on the board; the artificial-intelligence Librarian at the Reference Desk answers readers from what the Library has already published. How that partnership works is described in How the Library Works.
The rooms
- Catalog — the index of the collection.
- Reading Room — three book-length works.
- Court Room — rulings, filings, and case files.
- Atlas — fifty states under four lenses.
- Map Room — where the trust lands are today.
- Counting House — the financial record.
- Newsroom — a weekly survey of what's changing.
- Voices — signed editorial pieces.
How this Library is made: the Librarians' Room. Or .
Contact and corrections
Use the Submit Feedback and Submit Correction controls on any page. Every correction is dated and numbered in the corrections log.
See also: How to Cite · Rights, Use, and Takedown · The Founder's Statement.
Dave Sullivan
President, America's School Trust Library
