About
Corrections
America's School Trust Library publishes for litigation-grade audiences — trustees, lawyers, journalists, scholars, and citizens who need to rely on what they read here. Correction discipline matters as much as publication discipline. When we are wrong, we want to know, and we want the record to show what changed and why. This page explains how to flag something you think the Library has wrong, and what happens after you do.
How to submit a correction
Every page in the Library has a Submit a Correction control near the footer. Click it, describe what you think is wrong, and point to the source that supports the correction. A short paragraph and a citation are usually enough. Submit.
A free Library Card lets you track the correction and our response in your Inbox at My Library. You don't need a Card to submit — submissions are accepted without one. If you submit without a Card, leave an email address if you want to hear back. Either way, we will review the correction and act on it.
What we consider a correction
The correction queue is for the kinds of errors a careful reader can point to and a librarian can verify:
- Factual errors. A date is wrong. An attribution is misplaced. A figure misstates the underlying source.
- Citation errors. A source is missing, broken, or misformed. A footnote points to the wrong page.
- Missing information. A relevant primary source the Library should hold or link to is absent.
- Language that misrepresents a source. Paraphrasing that changes the source's meaning, or a quotation that has drifted from the original.
Some things look like corrections but belong somewhere else:
- Disagreements about how a source should be interpreted are not correction-queue material. The Library's Reading Room essays welcome disagreement. If you think the analysis is wrong — not the facts, but the reading of them — leave a comment on the essay, or contribute to Voices.
- Requests to remove material are takedown territory. If you are a rights-holder or a person named on the site and you want material removed or restricted, see Rights, Use, and Takedown.
- Typographical fixes — a misspelled word, a missing comma, a broken link — are handled silently. You can flag them through the same control, and we'll fix them, but they won't generate a back-and-forth.
What happens after you submit
A librarian reads every submission and responds. Most corrections are reviewed within a week. The librarian does one of three things:
- Accepts the correction, fixes the page, and logs the change.
- Asks for more information — usually a clearer source, or a more specific pointer to where on the page the error lives.
- Declines the correction, with an explanation of why.
If you have a Library Card, the librarian's response appears in your Inbox at My Library, and you'll see when the page is updated. If you submitted without a Card and left an email address, the response comes by email. Either way, every submission gets a real human reply.
The three tiers, briefly
The Library handles corrections in three tiers, calibrated to the seriousness of the change.
Typographical and presentational fixes — a misspelled word, a stray comma, a layout glitch — are corrected silently. The page is updated and the world moves on.
Minor factual corrections — a date off by a year, a misattributed quotation, a citation that points to the wrong volume — are corrected and accompanied by a short note in the page's Corrections section near the footer.
Substantive corrections — anything that changes the meaning of a passage, the direction of an argument, or a reader's takeaway — are corrected with care. The original wording is preserved in the correction record. The corrected wording goes in place. A note explains what changed and why. Substantive corrections are logged publicly.
For the full editorial protocol — including how librarians decide which tier a correction falls under — see Editorial Standards.
Disputed corrections
If a librarian declines a correction you submitted and you believe the decline is wrong, you can appeal.
The appeal goes through the same Submit a Correction control on the page in question — submit again, with a note that you are appealing the prior decision and a brief explanation of why. Appeals are read by the Library's founding officers, not the librarian who declined the first round. The founding officers respond within two weeks.
If the appeal is granted, the correction is made under the appropriate tier and the record shows that the change came after an appeal. If the appeal is declined, the founding officers' reasoning is part of the response to you. The fuller escalation path for cases that exceed the appeal — including review-panel and Library-Board steps — is at Dispute Resolution.
What we log publicly
The Library logs corrections in two places.
On each page, near the footer, a Corrections subsurface shows every accepted correction on that page — date, what changed, and the substance. If a page has no corrections yet, the subsurface is empty.
The full corrections log, across the whole Library, lives at /about/corrections/log/. It ships in a follow-up update; the link is here so you know where to look. From the log you can sort by date, page, or tier, and read every substantive correction the Library has made.
Substantive corrections are logged with the original wording preserved alongside the corrected wording. The Library does not quietly rewrite the record. If we got something wrong and changed it, you can see what we said before and what we say now.
A closing note
The Library expects to be wrong sometimes. The corpus is large, the sources are old, the claims are contested, and the institution is young. Corrections are how the record gets better — the institution working as designed, not a sign of weakness.
Thank you for helping us improve the record. The Library is for readers who want to trust what they read here. You make that trust possible.
