Policies

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Terms of Use
Privacy
UNT Libraries Policies
Partnership Agreements

Terms of Use

Copyright Statement

The contents of The Portal to Texas History (digital content including images, text, and sound and video recordings) are made publicly available by the collection-holding partners for use in research, teaching, and private study.

The nature of historical archival and manuscript collections often makes it difficult to determine the copyright status of an item. Please contact the collection-holding partner for additional available information regarding copyright status of a particular digital image, text, or sound or video recording.

The Portal to Texas History and the holding repositories provide the digital resources and information as a service to aid users in determining the copyright status of an item. Ultimately, however, it is the user's responsibility to use an item according to the terms governing its use.

The owning partner repositories are eager to hear from any copyright owners who are not properly identified so that appropriate information may be provided to researchers and teachers in the future.

Conditions of Use

By their use of these digital images, texts, audio, and video recordings, users agree to follow these conditions of use.

  • Responsibility for any use of these materials rests exclusively with the user.

  • Some materials in these collections may be protected by the U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.). In addition, the reproduction of some materials may be restricted by terms of gift or purchase agreements, donor restrictions, privacy and publicity rights, licensing and trademarks. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by copyright law requires the written permission of the copyright owners.

  • When using an item from The Portal to Texas History, the Portal prefers that users give proper credit to the collection-owning partner and the Portal. The Portal's Citing Guide was influenced by the "Humanities Style" of the Chicago Manual of Style and by Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills. Because the Portal is both a digital library and a preservation archive, three levels of identification are included in citations.

    • Identification of the original item;
    • Identification of an item's electronic format, its digital location (Persistent Link), the date the item was accessed, and the digital archive's name and location (URL);
    • Identification of the location of the original document.

Privacy

The following sections provide specific information about how we collect and use data on The Portal to Texas History. You may also want to review the UNT Libraries' Digital Collections Usage and Feedback Policy for relevant information.

Privacy and Cookies

We collect anonymous statistics about visitor behaviors to enhance our understanding of ways everyday users like you use this site. This information also allows us to provide additional functionality that, we hope, will improve your experience. Like many websites, we do this by storing small, often temporary, text files in your browser. Examples of the kinds of data we collect are: aggregated counts of pages viewed, technical details about the browser, interface elements you clicked on, and how far down a page you scrolled.

By collecting this information, we (the site maintainers) can discover:

  • Larger patterns of site use.
  • Popular content.
  • Underutilized features.

It also allows us to:

  • Provide short introductory tutorials to new users, but hide the tutorials on return visits.
  • Show users which items they've visited during their online session.
  • Display or hide targeted notifications.

Collecting and Sharing Personal Information

We do not know personal identifying information such as your name or email address unless you provide it to us in a feedback form, sign up for an email newsletter, or interact with us on social media. Even if you provide us such details, we cannot and do not tie your personal information to a browsing session history.

In order to collect and analyze data about site visits, we use the most recent version of Google Analytics, setting it to anonymize your IP address as early as possible in the data-transmission process. You can learn more about Google Analytics.

In order to provide the fastest possible experience to you, we also employ content delivery networks (CDNs) to deliver commonly available CSS and JavaScript files to your browser. This technique is used by sites all over the world, but since these files are provided by third party networks we cannot make absolute claims about privacy. If you employ ad-blocking or use other means to block commonly used CDNs, we attempt to fall back to local copies of the files. In all cases, we will not sell or knowingly provide information to advertisers or other third parties with one exception. As an educational site, we will use aggregated data about site visits in scholarly communications with our peers.

Disabling Cookies and Browser Storage

You can use your browser's controls to restrict the use of cookies and local or session storage. Here is advice for how to do this in:

You can also opt out of Google Analytics if you wish. Various third party browser extensions and tools allow you to block Google Analytics as well.

Updates

We may update this information from time to time. You can always check back here for the latest information.

UNT Libraries Policies

Because it is deployed at the University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History may also be governed by these policies:

You can find additional context for these policies at our Trusted Digital Repository page which details the self-audit we conducted in 2015.

Partnership Agreements

Portal Partners are required to complete one or both of these agreements before their materials are processed and added to the Portal.

  • Portal Partnership Agreement Word | PDF
  • Memorandum of Agreement for Digital Rights Word | PDF
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