About

Rights, Use, and Takedown

America's School Trust Library is an evidentiary archive. It holds a mix of original writing by the Library's authors, public-domain primary sources, scholarly material referenced but not redistributed, public-records material released under public-records law, and links to copyrighted work that the Library does not host. This page describes what readers may do with each kind of material, and how a rights holder who believes content is hosted in error can ask the Library to take it down.

If you are a reader, this page tells you what you can reuse, what you should attribute, and what to ask about before reusing. If you are a rights holder, it tells you how to reach us and what we will do when you do. If you represent an institution that wants to redistribute or embed Library material at scale, please write to us before doing so; the address is at the bottom of /about/.

Library-authored content

Reading Room essays, catalog records, Visualizations, state-page narratives, the Counting House figures pages, and other work created by the Library's authors and contributors are the Library's own. We make this material available for reuse under standard fair-use principles for scholarship, journalism, and educational purposes. You do not need to ask us before quoting a passage in a paper, citing a figure in an article, or assigning a Reading Room essay to a class.

For republication — reposting an essay in full, mirroring a catalog record on another site, embedding a Visualization in another publication — attribution and a link back to the original page on schooltrusts.net are required, and you should write to us first so we know it is happening.

Commercial reuse — selling Library material, packaging it into a paid product, or running it behind a paywall — requires written permission. Write to us at the address at /about/ and tell us what you want to do; we are usually able to say yes for purposes that align with the Library's mission.

For the citation format, see How to Cite.

Public-domain primary sources

Federal statutes, state statutes, court decisions in published opinions, the Admissions Acts, the Northwest Ordinance, the original 1785 Land Ordinance, and historical documents past their copyright term are public-domain material. You can reuse them without restriction; the Library has no rights to assert over them. The provenance citations the Library attaches to these items — where we got them, what edition or printing, and any catalog identifiers — should stay with the material so the next reader can verify what they are looking at.

Discovery records and primary-record holdings

The Library hosts material from public litigation — Bates-stamped documents from public production, filings from the public docket, agency records released under public-records law — under public-records principles and in good faith. These records illuminate how state trust administration actually works, and that record is in the public interest.

If you are an individual named in one of these records and you believe a specific item should not be public, write to us using the takedown procedure below and we will review it. The Library is not an adversary of individual public servants; we want the record straight, not a particular person embarrassed.

Scholarship cited but not redistributed

Books, articles, and dissertations by named scholars are referenced throughout the Library's catalog. The Library does not redistribute copyrighted scholarly material in full. We cite the work, summarize the argument where fair-use permits, and link to a stable hosted copy when one exists — usually at the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, JSTOR, an author's institutional repository, or a publisher's open-access page.

If you are a scholar whose work the Library cites and the link the Library uses is not the one you would prefer readers reach, write to us and we will update it.

Multimedia

Period maps, archival photography, contemporary illustrations, recorded interviews, and other multimedia each carry their provenance and rights status on the page where they appear. Items the Library has cleared — public domain, licensed for the use, or original work commissioned by or contributed to the Library — are reusable per the item's stated rights. Items whose rights status is unclear are treated as not-yet-cleared and are removed if a rights holder objects.

Takedown procedure

If you believe Library content infringes your rights, you can ask us to take it down.

A takedown request must include:

• Your identity and how to reach you, including an email address we can reply to and, where possible, a phone number.
• The specific URLs of the material in question. One URL per item; a single request can cover more than one item.
• The nature of your claim — what rights you hold and how the Library's use is alleged to infringe them.
• A statement that the request is made in good faith.

You can send a takedown request to the address listed at /about/, or use the Submit-Feedback control on the page in question and mark the submission as a rights claim.

What happens next:

• We acknowledge receipt within five business days.
• We review within twenty business days of the acknowledgment.
• We either remove the material, or we explain in writing why removal is not warranted and what alternative — a correction, a clarification, a different link, an attribution change — we are willing to make instead.

If you disagree with the outcome of the review, you can appeal in writing to the Library's founding officers, named at /pro/governance/. The appeal review is conducted by whichever of the two founding officers did not handle the original request, and the result is final at the Library level. For the full escalation procedure see Dispute Resolution.

A note on the difference between correction and removal

The Library prefers correction to removal where the underlying issue is factual. If a Library page says something wrong about you or your work, we want to know — and we want to fix it on the record, not erase it. Takedown is for genuine rights claims; it is not the right tool for disputes over what the historical record shows. For factual disputes, please see the Corrections page.