For families and historians who hold records
What this Library is
America’s School Trust Library is an Oregon nonprofit public benefit corporation, Oregon Registry No. 259005891, formed in July 2026. It collects, verifies and publishes the record of the school trust lands the United States granted to the states at statehood — what was granted, what was promised, what happened to it, and what the courts have said about it. Beginning in 1785, Congress set aside land in every township — the six-mile survey square the country was laid out in — to support the public schools; roughly twenty states still hold those lands and their funds today. The Library publishes in the open, corrects in public, and keeps a numbered corrections ledger anyone can read. Everything is free: no fee, no account, no affiliation. It takes no side in any case or campaign.
It is not asking you for money. It asks for documents and hands.
schooltrusts.org
Somebody in your family kept the papers
A career’s worth of field notes; agency reports from an office that no longer exists; interviews on cassette; a shelf of printed monographs; photographs with names on the back.
Those files do not survive a move, a failed drive, or a funeral. This is not a failure of care. It is the ordinary fate of a record with no keeper.
The Library has now done this once, in public, with a living creator watching every step. Here is what happened, because it is the honest way to describe what would happen to yours.
What the Library did with one man’s life’s work
In June 2026 the Library sent Dr. Bob Zybach a signing packet for his research archive. The Library’s pages describe him as the historian of Oregon forest history, oral history and historical ecology. His reply the next day raised three concerns: permanence, meaning where the originals would live; the value of a life’s work; and his own time.
The packet was rewritten. He became a Contributor, not a Donor. The copyright-assignment option was dropped. The originals stay wherever he chooses.
The collection went public on September 4, 2026 as a working edition — labelled unfinished, because it is. On September 5 it stood at 1,829 pages, with fifteen monographs made page-addressable so that any page can be cited and linked.
And some of it is held. 108 pages of the Soap Creek monographs and the 1999 thesis are held under one notice, with further material in the 1828 series; the reasons are kept internal. Each held page keeps its printed number and its permanent link, so a citation to it still lands in the right place.
Wow! I just spent about an hour on this and it is amazing! A little bit intimidating dealing with my own work, but definitely impressive and functional.
Quotation pending his written approval — Bob Zybach, email, September 5, 2026
For Bob Zybach to write
In Bob’s own words
Anything you would tell a person who is deciding whether to let a library do this to their papers — including what worried you, and whether it turned out to be the right worry. About 150 words. It goes in as you write it.
The terms, in plain words
-
A non-exclusive licence. You give the Library permission to publish; you keep every right you hold today, including every commercial right, and may publish, sell or license the same material anywhere else, exactly as you do now.
-
No money changes hands. The Library pays nothing for a collection and takes nothing exclusive. That is deliberate: it is what keeps you free.
-
The originals stay where they are. Your attic, your university, your historical society — the Library’s edition is a copy and an index, not a claim on your paper.
-
Holds for anything sensitive. Material can be withheld from the edition under one generic notice, with the reasons kept internal — including anything you have not yet decided about.
-
A takedown rule, published before the collection went up rather than after. Two business days to acknowledge; removal from search while a request is reviewed; a written decision within ten business days. A request from a tribal government is honoured immediately. A narrator’s or a family’s objection is final — no investigation, no argument.
-
Nothing is locked shut. A hold or a withdrawal can be asked for at any time and is decided under the published takedown rule.
Write two paragraphs to the Library at library@schooltrusts.net, addressed to the Secretary, Kenneth Magee. There is no form.
In the first, say what you hold, roughly how much of it there is, and where it is now. In the second, say what you would need promised before you let it be copied.
Nothing is signed at that stage. Nothing is moved. Nothing goes online.
Before you send anything
Describe it rather than send it, and the Library will tell you whether it belongs. Before any substantial accession the board answers two questions in writing: where does this belong, and what school-trust question does it illuminate? If there is no good answer the Library declines, with thanks and a referral. A collection in the wrong library is lost twice.
And if the answer is yes, what you get is not a receipt. It is a named collection, kept intact, with its own finding aid, its creator’s own biographical note, and a permanent link that a researcher in fifty years can still follow to the page.
One honest limit
The Library has not yet filed its application for federal tax-exempt recognition; it is being prepared. No federal tax-exemption determination has been issued, and until one is, the Library does not describe contributions as tax-deductible.
