If you've read our mission statement, you know that our goal is to provide a high-quality knowledge resource for a reasonable price - free, in fact. We want to provide all of this without nagging you with banner ads or hawking books and posters at every turn. This means that to start, all costs are handled out of our own pockets. If that sounds like a venture worthy of your support, we have lots of ways for you to help.

Donate Knowledge:
    - Technical Knowledge
    - Legal/accounting knowledge
    - Scholarly knowledge - i.e, "content"
Donate Stuff
    - Software
    - Bandwidth
    - Photographs
    - Books
Is this site worth a dollar?
   - If you find that we provide a valuable service, and you'd like to help us offset our hosting costs, you can donate money through this link to Amazon's Honor System. Using a credit card, you can anonymously donate as little as a dollar, though we'll gladly accept more. :-)

Spread the word
Help people discover us by placing a banner on your site. These are the standard small banners you find on a lot of blogs; we will try to get some larger sizes up in the future. As a side note, we prefer the use of PNGs, but we provide GIFs for compatibility reasons. Just right click on an image to save it, and link the image to "http://www.the-athenaeum.org"

80 by 15 pixel PNG
80 by 15 pixel GIF
80 by 15 pixel PNG
80 by 15 pixel GIF

Technical knowledge
The Athenaeum is run by a small core of people, with limited expertise. We have a wishlist of services we'd like to set up, and you could help us with the following:

• Open source - Ok, this isn't a need, but we want to stress that this is an open source project. We'd like to use open source wherever possible, and release our solutions to the community. That being said, I guess this is a request. We'll probably need to set up a SourceForge site. Wanna help? :-)
• Security - We want to set up user accounts/profiles, but have little knowledge of the security issues.
• A bulliten board- Are you a pro with phpBB? Help us customize our bulliten board.
• Code optimization - Help optimize our PHP code, or help implement valid HTML 4.0 and CSS.
• PostgreSQL expertise - We are actually learning PostgreSQL as we build the site! Help with security issues, or db optimization.
• Documentation/Versioning - We know that as the site grows (and with it the number of maintainers), documentation and versioning will be key. Help us understand and/or implement measures to keep everything coherent.
• Design - We haven't forgotten design. We welcome design help both in the aesthetic sense, and in the more scientific user interface sense. Our aim is for this site to be as pleasing and easy to use as possible. Much of the web is confusing, ugly, and impersonal. We don't want to repeat that mistake.

Legal/Accounting knowledge
The fact that we lump these two together probably demonstrates our need for such expertise. As we grow, we'll need to navigate the legal status of our company (for instance, we want to be non-profit, while subjecting ourselves as little as possible to the whims of a board). At some point, we will start looking at grants as a possible funding source. We'll also need to come up with a reliable accounting system for any donated equipment or services. Perhaps most important, we'll end up diving into the morass that is modern copyright law. If you are willing to teach us, or are looking for an adventure where you can help the common good, let us know.

Scholarly knowledge - i.e., "content"
Of course, the bulk of our site will eventually depend upon user-driven knowledge acquisition. Translation? We'll need a veritable army of enthusiasts and scholars to collect primary texts, images, and original scholarly work. Scanning images and typing text is time-intensive, and in the end this site can only be as good as the work we all put into it. We are continually working on the tools to allow more kinds of user input. In the meantime, collect stuff - artwork, photographs, writings, facts about historical events and figures, and your own personal notes. There will be a place for it all.

On a side note, we want this site to be a resource for studies from early education up to postgraduate work. We need you to help us define what data to store, and how to display it. For instance, would it be useful to have a button on a bibliography to instantly switch from MLA to Chicago or AP style? Let us know what you need.

One very good area to help is by clicking the "Action items" link on the navigation bar. This will bring you to a page that lists missing information - artworks without titles or artist names, for instance. You can help us make sure our information is correct.

Donate stuff
One of the advantages of a web-based operation is low overhead. But we'll still need lots of things to keep this outfit going. Here are some examples:

• Software - We are trying to use open source (and free) software where available. But in some cases proprietary software is best (and providers of free software deserve to be paid, as well). At the moment, for example, we are using a trial copy of WS_FTP. It costs $39.95. Photoshop, the graphics program we'd like to use, is almost $600. You could brighten our day and help spread the humanities with donated licenses. Expect a list soon.
• Bandwidth - We have a mixture of hope and fear about this site's popularity. Of course, we want to provide the most knowledge to the most people. But there is a cost for transferring that knowledge. Individual images of good resolution may be 100kb. If each of 1000 people look at 100 images, that's a gigabyte of information. If you've ever hosted a site, you know how quickly it can add up. When you add in all of the features we want to host - forums, user notes, user-uploaded text and images, film (we hope!) - bandwidth emerges as our single biggest cost. If you can donate money towards bandwidth, or (even better) if you are an ISP who can mirror our site or host us at a cheap rate - you will be helping a great deal.
• Photographs - Specifically, we are talking about being given the indefinite right to use photographs, in particular historical photographs and photos of artworks. Licensing fees are the biggest hurdle to a venture like this. Donating the rights to use images will help us tremendously. We'll be working out all of the legal stuff as we go along.
• Books - While we will happily accept modern books, we are primarily looking for older books. The reason for this is twofold. First, older books are the ones in danger of falling out of the public eye. An old, out-of-print book is useless if one can't get to it. Secondly, older books may have no copyright issues to negotiate. As a general rule, we'd like to archive any book that has lasting value and is devoid of copyright. If you're not sure, ask. It doesn't not have to mean donating the book itself, although somebody will have to enter the text.