Terms of Service

What Scriptorium is

Scriptorium is a personal archive for reading and ministry writing. You catalogue the books you read, keep notes on them, record sermons and other writing, and connect all of it through Scripture and the church year.

It is run by Spritz Solutions, LLC, an Alabama limited liability company, of Mountain Brook, Alabama. Questions, problems and requests go to support@spritzsolutions.com, and a person reads that address.

What it costs

Free for seminarians, for as long as you are in seminary. That one is a promise, not an introductory offer.

Nothing, today. Scriptorium is free while it is being built and while its first readers are finding out whether it is useful, and there is no plan to charge for it.

An earlier version of these terms named a yearly charge for clergy after the first year. That is withdrawn. If a paid tier ever exists, you will be told before it applies to you, and nothing you have written will be locked away because you stopped paying.

Your account

You sign in with a link sent to your email address. There is no password.

You can add more than one sign-in address, and you should. An address issued by a school or a parish stops working when you leave, and an archive reachable only through an address someone else controls is an archive you can lose. Add a personal address early.

Any address you add is a way into everything. Whoever opens a sign-in link sent to it can read the whole archive — your books, notes, comments and writing — and there is no way to add an address that sees less. Add addresses you control, and no others.

What is yours

Everything you put in — your books, notes, comments, writing, and the connections between them — is yours. We do not claim ownership of it, we do not use it to train anything, and we do not sell it or share it with anyone.

Ask at support@spritzsolutions.com and we will send you a copy of your archive in a form you can read without Scriptorium.

What other people can see

Your writing is private. Always. Sermons, reflections, papers and letters are never shared by Scriptorium. There is no setting that publishes them and no feature that shows them to another reader. Who can read them is who can sign in to your Scriptorium — you, and any address you have added yourself.

Your books, notes and shelves are private. Nobody sees what you own except through a sign-in address you have added yourself. Private is not the same as safe to confide in — see What not to put here.

A comment on a book is written to be shared. Scriptorium lets you write a comment about a published book, and other readers who have the same book can read it. That is what the comment box is for; anything you want kept to yourself goes in that book's notes instead. Each comment is a separate act — there is no setting that shares things on your behalf, and nothing you have already written becomes shared because a feature was added.

A shared comment shows what you wrote, the Scripture references you gave it, and the edition it is about — the publisher and year, the page number if you gave one, and, on a search result, the book's title and author. It does not show your name. It does not show your email address, your library, or anything else about you.

Your name is not shown, and we would rather be plain about what that does and does not mean. Scriptorium records that the comment is yours, so that you can come back and change or remove it, and so that one person cannot flood a page — but no reader sees it. And Scriptorium is small: somebody who has the same book and reads it the same week may still work out who wrote a comment, and no setting can prevent that. Write a shared comment as though a colleague will read it, because one may.

Readers who have the book can mark a shared comment up or down, and a comment can show how many of each it has received. We record which account cast which mark, so that one account cannot mark the same comment twice. That record is never shown to the comment's author or to other users. Marks do not change the order comments appear in and are not used to hide anything.

A shared comment is visible only to signed-in Scriptorium readers who have the same book. Nobody else can read it: readers who do not have the book can see only that comments exist and how many. Shared comments are not public, not indexed by search engines, and not readable by anyone without an account. If that ever changes, it will apply only to comments written after the change, and only ones you opt in individually.

What not to put here

Scriptorium is not a confidential records system and should not be treated as one.

Do not record pastoral information about identifiable people — counselling notes, confessions, health information, or anything told to you in confidence. It is not built for that, it carries no legal protection you might assume, and a note about a book can identify a person by context even when no name appears in it.

What we ask of you

Be truthful about who you are. Do not post anything unlawful, or anything meant to harass or demean a person. Do not attempt to reach other people's private data.

Shared comments can be removed if they break these terms. Removal is recorded, reversible, and done by a person. If yours is removed you can ask why at support@spritzsolutions.com.

If you stop using it

Your archive stays, and we will not remove it quietly. If you stop signing in, your account becomes dormant and everything in it is kept. We do not delete accounts for inactivity.

We are a small operation, and we are not going to pretend we can hold an archive forever whatever happens. So the promise we can keep is this one: we will never remove your archive without telling you first and sending you a copy. If we ever cannot keep a dormant archive — because the service is ending, or because holding it is no longer something we can sustain — you will hear from us at least ninety days beforehand, at every address on your account, and you will be sent a copy of everything before anything is removed. If you answer, it stays.

If you want it deleted, ask at support@spritzsolutions.com and it will be deleted for real — not hidden. You can also ask us to delete your shared comments while keeping your archive, or the other way round.

Age

You must be at least 18 to use Scriptorium.

Changes, and endings

If these terms change, you will be told, and you will be asked to accept the new version the next time you sign in. What you accepted and when is recorded.

Scriptorium is a small operation. If it ever has to stop, you will get notice and a copy of your archive before it does.

The dull but necessary part

Scriptorium is provided as it is, without warranty. It is a personal archive and not a backup service — keep your own copies of anything you could not bear to lose. To the extent the law allows, Spritz Solutions, LLC is not liable for lost data or for what you do with the service.

These terms are governed by the law of Alabama, United States of America.