About

Building This Library

America's School Trust Library is at a point where the speed of the work has gotten ahead of the institution that should be holding it. This page is an invitation to readers, contributors, prospective partners, peer librarians, and anyone else who cares where this library is going to weigh in on a question I'd rather not answer alone.

What's happening

Over the last two weeks — and yes, only two weeks — with substantial help from an AI working in the role of architect and librarian, I've built this library at a pace I would not have thought possible. The Reading Room has three book-length works in late draft. The Atlas covers all fifty states. The Counting House has the financial record. The Newsroom and the Voices section are running. The engagement layer — feedback, corrections, discussions, reviews, applications for librarian roles — has been live for several days. The Pro side at /pro/ carries the governance and editorial documentation. The State Co-Librarian applications are open. The work has compounded in two weeks at a rate that would have taken years in the older mode of working. For a longer account of how this Library came to be, see A Note from the Founder.

That speed has brought me to a question I cannot answer well by myself: what kind of institution should hold this library over the long run?

Where the Library sits today

The Library is currently an initiative of Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands (OASTL), my own organization. OASTL is the active plaintiff in the Oregon standing case now before the appellate courts. OASTL has been the right short-term host — a working 501(c)(3) with the operational capacity to incubate the Library — and it remains the host while the next chapter is figured out. Nothing about the day-to-day work changes while this conversation is happening.

What I'm thinking, tentatively

My current leaning is that the Library should become its own independent 501(c)(3), separate from OASTL, with its own board drawn from the people the Library is actually answerable to: library and archival professionals, education-finance experts, a trust-and-fiduciary lawyer, and as State Co-Librarians come online, one or two of them. OASTL would continue as fiscal host until the new entity stands up — twelve to eighteen months feels like the right window, though that may be wrong.

The reasoning is simple. The Library's authority depends on its perceived independence from the litigation work. Even after the Oregon case resolves, the case will leave a residue, and trustees, foundation officers, peer institutions, and the school-finance professionals the Library most wants to serve will be more comfortable engaging an entity that isn't fiscally entangled with the side that was suing them. Permanence — the third word in the phrase "dedicated, permanent, authoritative library" — requires institutional independence from any one founder or any one cause. The Library should outlive me, outlive any one lawsuit, and outlive the political weather of any one decade.

There are other forms. The Library could stay an OASTL initiative longer. It could spin off into a joint OASTL/ASTL governance structure. It could be fiscally sponsored under an existing institution like the Internet Archive, an academic library, or a foundation. Each has tradeoffs I have not fully thought through. The independent-501(c)(3) frame is my leaning, not a decision.

What this page is asking for

I would like your thoughts. Specifically:

If you work in libraries or archives, I would like to know what working institutions of this kind actually need that a founder might not see. What did your library or archive get right at its founding? What did it get wrong? What kinds of board members make the difference between a working institution and a vanity project?

If you have built or governed a small nonprofit before, I would like your read on the standup. Is the independent-501(c)(3) form the right answer here, or is there a better one? What did your standup cost in time and money? What did you wish you had known at month one?

If you work in education finance, school administration, state trust lands, or adjacent policy fields, I would like your read on whether this library is useful to you and what it would take to be more useful. If you would consider being one of the people who help govern it, I would like to hear that too.

If you are a peer institution — a state archive, a school of education, a public-finance research outfit, a foundation that funds civic infrastructure — I would like to talk about how we might collaborate, and about who else I should be in conversation with.

If you are a reader of this library who simply cares whether it survives, I would like your honest reaction. What would make you trust this institution over decades? What would make you walk away?

There is no specific ask attached to this invitation beyond your thoughts. If your reaction includes an offer — to advise, to serve on a founding board, to fund the standup, to host a collaboration — I will be grateful to hear it, but the invitation is for ideas first.

How to reach me

The cleanest path is to use the Submit Feedback control on this page (it's near the footer; you'll need a free Library Card to track our exchange, which takes a moment to set up). For more substantial responses, the Library Card system carries longer messages and lets us continue the conversation in your inbox.

If you would prefer to reach me directly — particularly if you are speaking on behalf of an institution — the contact paths are on the About page. I read what comes in personally for now; that will scale into the founding officers' rotation once the institutional formation begins.

What this page is not

This page is not a fundraising solicitation. There is no donor portal here. If the conversation produces a founding board and that board decides on a fundraising plan, that plan will come from the board, not from this page.

This page is not an announcement of a decided plan. The institutional form is open. The board composition is open. The timeline is open. What is decided is that the Library should exist permanently and serve its beneficiaries — the present and future schoolchildren of the states — for as long as those beneficiaries exist.

This page is a working document. I expect to revise it as the conversation unfolds. The version you are reading is dated below.

Thank you

To anyone who reads this and weighs in: thank you. You are doing the kind of work the school trust lands themselves were supposed to make easy and never quite did. The school trusts are an experiment in multi-generational stewardship that has been running for two and a quarter centuries, and one of the things their record teaches is that the institutions that hold trusts have to be tended by communities, not by founders alone. The Library is small. The community that builds it can still be the right community from the start. Thank you for being part of that community.

— Dave Sullivan, President, OASTL

Page last updated: 2026-05-12. The substance of this page will move as the conversation does.