Contribute
How to contribute
The Library grows through readers, contributors, and curators.
This is a delightfully non-partisan issue. It doesn't matter what party you're in, or if you're an independent, you still love your children, your grandchildren, and the other children that are all going to grow up, be workers, and be paying your social security.
— Margaret Bird, video transcript on file (August 2025).
Send a source
The collection grows by gift, and attics matter as much as archives: old
agency reports, school-board minutes, lease and sale records, maps,
letters, photographs, newspaper clippings — public-record material from
any of the school-trust states. The Library preserves what you send,
records where it came from, and makes it findable for every reader after
you. If you are not sure whether something belongs, describe it rather
than send it, and the Library will tell you.
Write to the Library about a document →
Correct a page
If anything on these shelves looks wrong — a figure, a date, a citation,
a characterization — say so. Material errors are fixed, and the fix is
made in public. No Library Card is required.
Report an error → · The protocol
is at Corrections.
Help maintain a state
Watch school-trust news in your own state and report what you see —
board votes, budget moves, audit releases, court filings, agency
turnover. One item is enough to start. Each state also has room for a
named curator of its record; the roles are described at
Roles.
If you work for a State Department of Lands, a State Land Board, or any
of the other agencies in the roughly twenty states that still hold
school trust lands — please read the
dedicated page for state-lands-agency staff.
What contributors are actually doing
The Library exists for a constituency that does not yet know it is one. As
Margaret Bird puts it: Most people don’t realize they
are the beneficiaries of this trust.
The school-trust corpus was set
aside in 1785 for the schoolchildren of the Republic in perpetuity, and
that beneficiary class — every public-school child in every land-grant
state, plus the watchdog citizens, school-board members, journalists,
and lawyers who hold the trust on their behalf — has rarely been told.
Open roles
America's School Trust Library is an Oregon nonprofit public benefit
corporation, and its board of directors — the three people named on the
About page — was seated August 3, 2026.
Two director seats are open now, with particular
attention to education, libraries and archives, finance, and beneficiary
communities. Directors serve one-year terms, serve without compensation,
and sign the annual disclosure in the
Conflict of Interest Policy.
A Law Librarian seat is open as well. The bylaws make it
a professional role rather than an officer or director seat: the Law
Librarian stewards the legal collection under a written charter covering
collection scope, cataloging, citation verification, public legal
information, and the separation of public Library work from privileged,
confidential, or active-litigation work. The Library provides legal
information, never legal advice.
Write to the Library, say which seat interests you and what you would
bring to it, and the board will answer.
Write to the Library about a board or Law Librarian seat →
The full ladder of contributor and librarian roles is at
Roles. How the Library is made — method,
standards, record — is gathered in the
Librarians' Room.
What we don't ask
No copyright transfer (corrections and annotations are licensed CC BY 4.0 by
default; primary-source contributions are public-domain dedications). No
political alignment — the Library is a fiduciary-data project, not an
advocacy outlet, and accepts contributions from anyone with the accuracy and
good faith to do the work. No commitment beyond what you choose. No fees.
About donations
The Library is not asking you for money, and that is deliberate: it asks
for documents and hands before dollars. One honest limit: no federal
tax-exemption determination has been issued, and until one is, the
Library does not describe contributions as tax-deductible. When the
Library begins accepting support, this page will say so plainly.
Curated by Library editorial team, 2026-05-08; updated 2026-08-13.
