Welcome to Footprints!

We’re happy to have you join the ever-growing community of contributors to Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place. Footprints aims to produce careful scholarship on the basis of a “trusted crowdsourcing” model. Your contributions will enhance the reach of this project and its utility to people interested in the Jewish book.

As you join the project, please keep the following in mind:

1. Unless specifically agreed upon and contracted with Footprints co-directors, it is important to remember that when using special collections libraries you do not officially represent Footprints and are working as an independent researcher.

2. Questions from users about the project that cannot be answered based on publicly available documentation should always be directed to the project co-directors.

3. If you are planning to work in a special collection library and request a large number of books to check for footprints, please get in touch with one of the project co-directors first. Working with a special collection for your own research projects and adding footprints you find incidentally is always welcomed, but please do keep us in the loop. Volunteer work with a collection with the main purpose of adding footprints can be helpful but this needs to be coordinated. We have ongoing relationships with some libraries and plans for future collaborations with others. In any case, it is important to make sure that you (and we) do not become a burden on library staff.

4. Before beginning on a broader project (rather than occasional and incidental findings), please check in with a project director to ensure that the project is not already being done by another contributor.

5. As a general rule, contributors should generally only work on one project at a time. Working on multiple collections simultaneously often leads to unfinished work and duplicates.

Of course, we are always happy to discuss exceptions to these guidelines. We are grateful for your contributions to making this invaluable resource even more robust. Please don’t hesitate to be in touch with any questions.

Copyright information

  • By submitting your contribution, you grant a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicensable royalty-free license to the managers of the Footprints project (The Project) to preserve, archive, reproduce, and distribute your work. This permission includes the right to modify your material to conform to the goals of the Project, to reformat it as necessary to preserve its perceptibility and usefulness, and to make it available for educational, research, and promotional purposes outside of the Project, in perpetuity and in all media formats. This license does not authorize exploitation of your contribution for profit or commercial use. You also understand that your work is open access under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
  • You warrant that the material you submit is created by you, wholly original, and has not been copied from or based upon any other photographic, literary, or other material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain, or you have permission of the copyright owner, or its use is allowed by "Fair Use" as prescribed by the terms of United States copyright law (cf. Title 17 of the U.S. Code).
  • In granting this permission, you warrant that you are 18 years of age or older and have the full power and authority to consent to this agreement, that your submission does not infringe any existing copyright or contain any libelous matter, does not identify a minor, nor invade any third party rights of privacy or publicity, and Content does not pose a risk of damage to the network, computers, or servers of Columbia University or any institution whose network, computers, or servers shall host the Project in the future.
  • The Project has no obligation to use or publish your contribution. You retain ownership of and copyright in the material you share.