The Library Card
A free account at America's School Trust Library.
A Library Card lets a reader save bookmarks across the Library — Sacred Compact essays, Schools of the Republic chapters, Founders' Library sources, per-state dossiers, Newsroom entries — and return to that saved reading from a personal page. The card costs nothing. The Library does not run advertisements. The card is the foundation for the constituency the Library has been arguing, across the published work, that the school-trust system has always required.
What you get with a card
- Bookmarks. A small icon on every essay, chapter, and per-state page. One click saves the page; one click on the same icon removes it.
- My Library. A personal page listing your saved reading, most recent first. No tracking, no recommendation engine, no algorithmic feed — just the pages you marked.
- A profile. Display name and a short bio if you want to leave one. Visible only to you for v1; later versions will let card holders opt in to a public-reader mode.
- The constituency loop. In coming weeks, the Library will open contributor roles — State Correspondent, State Co-Librarian, Title Steward, Library Board. Card holders are the population those invitations go to.
How sign-up works
Enter your email. The Library sends you a one-time login link. Click it to land on your My Library page. No password to remember; the email itself is the credential. If you ever need to sign in from a new device, the Library sends a fresh link.
From cardholder to librarian
The Card is also the first rung in the Library's contributor ladder: Library Card holder, Contributor, named librarian. A cardholder can submit corrections and source suggestions. A contributor has work accepted into the public record. A named librarian takes responsibility for a bounded part of the collection.
The full program is at Librarian Corps. Lawyers interested in citation work and state-appendix verification should also read For lawyers.
The Library's commitment
The card system carries no advertising and exposes no data to third parties. The Library uses Supabase as its account backend; Supabase stores the email address and the bookmark records, and nothing else about the reader is tracked. Sign-in cookies are set on the schooltrusts.net domain only. A reader who decides to leave can delete her account, and the deletion is propagated.
The card is the first piece of the architecture this Library has been writing about for two years. It is the institutional surface through which the standing constituency the school-trust experiment requires can, for the first time, be assembled at scale.
