| ||||||||
|
The Asatru Publishing Trust depends on your contributions for our very survival. Without your materials being made available, we literaly have no reason to exist. Not only does it require something to publish, it also takes money to run the servers, rent the building and pay for bandwidth. We hope to have our tax emempt status by the end of this year (2001), and to have a convienent way (PayPal) to accept cash donations. But our main need, at this time, is for material. We have as our goal the preservation of our modern lore - in order to preserve it, we have to be able to see it, read it, hear it and use it. It is to this end that we have designed the Common Domain Document License.We do not require that all items contributed be in the Common Domain - in many cases this is simply impossible. We do, however, ask our contributors to consider it, or another Open Content license. We believe that this is the best way to preserve our works for the future, and with copyright law in flux, this becomes more critical every day. If you've looked over our collections, you have some idea of what kind of stuff we're looking for. Usually, if an item is placed in the Common Domain or in the public domain, we would like to get the actual file for our archives. This allows us to include the material in our yearly CD distribution to our members. However, if you think about it, we have some small security issue with accepting files. If we receive a file via email, for example, with a note attached saying place this in the Common Domain and publish it, how do we know it came from where it says it came from? In other words, how can we be sure that it's really the author/copyright holder that sent us the file. This applies to all electronic media completely, and, to some extent, with printed material as well (more on that in a minute...). We've chosen to solve this problem as simply as possible. In the case of electronic documents already available online, contributing an item to the Common Domain becomes as simple as sending us a link (via our submission form). We then scan the link to see if the document we find is in either the Common Domain or the public domain. You simply either place the Common Domain notice or a link to our Common Domain window on the document or article you wish to submit using our tools. Once we receive the submission, a web bot from our site with pay your site a visit, and validate the link. When that's done, we grab the document for our archives, and store the link. We will also scan the link to make sure it stays current, and if it disappears, we'll use the copy in our archives, until notified otherwise. In the case of multimedia or graphics, you can either place the item on a page by itself with the appropiate copyright statement, or otherwise indicate the copyright (digital watermark, etc.). If you don't have a web page, but the documents are in electronic format, email us and we'll try to work it out. We just want to be very careful that we don't accept material that does not belong here. For items that you don't want to put up on the web, we'll accept almost any media format: floppy disk, CD ROM (preferred), even good old fashioned paper. These you'll have to mail to us - with instructions as to what, if anything we can scan. Material on paper that you don't want on line, won't get there. This applies to electronic media as well: it is, after all, your material. All of the material contributed to this effort will be made available in our research library. We will accept documents in nearly any word processing format, but we prefer HTML. For audio clips, MP3 or Sun/Next AU is the preferred format, but we will take WAVE files and convert them as necessary. Graphics, we prefer JPEG, but again, we will accept nearly any format that we can read, and that's most of them. Thanks for your support. If you have any questions whatsoever about the Raven Banner, the Asatru Publishing Trust or the Common Domain, please don't hesitate to drop us a line.
|