About the Asatru Publishing Trust
Our primary mission is to act as an archive and research library for the rebirth of Asatru. This is not another 'Lore
Site' - with lot's of Eddas, Sagas and linguistics from a thousand years ago. We have some of those, sure, and we have links to most
of the other places on the web where they can be found. There are a alot of sites devoted to their preservation, and most of
that material is already in the public domain. You'll find some general material about Asatru here, as well, but that's not really what we're about.
We're about preserving and making available our 'modern' lore - that is, material written or developed by Asatrurar in the past hundred years or so. This is the material that is most in danger of being lost, due primarily to the crazy quilt (and getting crazier every day, it seems) pattern of copyright laws and regulations. This is our lore - the material we will leave on Midgard for our descendents.
Let's face it: nobody's getting rich selling materials to the greater Asatru community. There just aren't enough of us for it to be profitable. Yet we are prodigious in our output of material, especially writings and graphic arts. Once printed, most of the material remains locked away, essentially lost. It is our goal to bring that material back, out where it can be read, enjoyed and absorbed.
This requires that authors and artists make the necessary adjustments to their copyrights. We encourge Asatru authors and artists to place their works under an Open Content license of some sort, perhaps even our own Common Domain Document License. We encourge this because we believe that these forms of copyright will encourage the broadest possible distribution and reuse of the material, while still preserving the authors copyright. Our lore tells us that the fair fame we win in this life will remain long after we are gone: what better way to win fame than to contribute to the body of lore that will lead in the restoration of Asgard's Honor? We will also house public domain documents, that is, documents with no copyright attached.
In addition to our online collection(s), we will establish an actual collection of documents, to be housed in an as yet undetermined location, and to be made available to the Asatru community, and insofar as is practical, to the entire world. We are attempting to establish contact with the keepers of other, defunct archives to obtain what material we can. This wil operate as a physical library, and will be made available to all interested researchers. This material would include copies of books and magazines, as well as actual documents and files.
We hope to eventually include more "academic" material such as books and monographs from university presses, a great many of which are very well done, and also very hard to find and/or not available at all to the general public.
Some of this material may have to be purchased: we are not above doing that sort of thing, and we will eventually ask visitors to contribute financially to these efforts. Any materials we do purchase will be placed immediately under an open content license.
Our collections include things such as the songs we sing at blot and sumbel, even the recipies from our moots! It includes the graphics and backgrounds from our web pages, pictures of ourselves and our kindreds, copies of our geneologies, polls and surveys of the community, brochures and flyers published by kindreds or individuals, and the rituals with which we worship, and celebrate our passages.
We are also making our tools available for use by the community. These could also be used by those who wish to place documents into the Common Domain that may not have anything to do with Asatru, or perhaps the author would rather maintain the document themselves.
Running an endeavor like this takes both time and money: initially we are being funded by our founders.
As we grow and get organized, we will offer memberships to the general Asatru community. This won't get the member much in the way of trade, perhaps a mirror CD at the end of each year, but it will allow us to seek the support of the community to continue this effort. Community is one of the pillars of our faith, and this effort will need that community perhaps more than any other.
The actual legal organization is underway currently. A legal "trust" is a different sort of beast, we may organize as The Raven Banner or some other, as yet undetermined name and in the form of a standard corporation in order to gain the broadest
possible leeway for our activities. In any event, we will be a non-proft organization, and we will eventually gain 501(c)(3) status, allowing us to offer tax deductions for contributions. Currently, however, that's not the case .... stay tuned!
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