Contribution Terms of Service

Updated June 8, 2018

You are being asked to contribute your recollections (for example, in the form of a story, image, or audiovisual recording) to the Harvey Memories Project (HMP), which is developing a permanent digital record of the events surrounding Hurricane Harvey. Your participation in this project will allow future historians, and people such as yourself, to gain a greater understanding of this event and the responses to it.

By submitting a contribution, you grant the Harvey Memories Project a nonexclusive license to make your item publicly available on the HMP website (with or without your name, depending on what you have indicated) and on the website of the Houston Flood Museum.  Materials in the HMP will be preserved for the long term.

You must be 18 years of age or older to submit material to us. Your submission of material constitutes your permission for, and consent to, the HMP, its members and others acting under the HMP’s permission or authority, to use, copy, sublicense, modify, transmit, publicly perform, display, and create derivative works of your material in connection with the HMP, in all media, whether now known or hereafter devised in perpetuity and without payment and without further notice to you.  The material you submit must have been created by you, wholly original, and shall not be copied from or based, in whole or in part, upon any other photographic, literary, or creative material, except to the extent that such material is in the public domain or is openly licensed (such as under certain Creative Commons licenses). Further, submitted material must not violate any confidentiality, privacy, security or other laws.

By submitting material to the HMP you release, discharge, and agree to be liable for, and hold harmless the HMP, its members and persons acting under its permission or authority, including a public library or archive to which the collection might be donated for purposes of long-term preservation, for and from, any claims or liability arising out the HMP's use of the material, including, without limitation, claims for violation of privacy, defamation, or misrepresentation. This release of liability extends to HMP’s liability if any private information attached to an item is released to the public. If you are concerned about exposing private data embedded in image files by some cameras and photography software, we suggest wiping the EXIF data from contributed images using an online resource such as Verexif before you upload an image to HMP.

Contributors are allowed to provide their emails at the time of contribution but are not required to do so. If you provide an email, a Guest User account will be created for you so that you can access all of your past contributions. Your email will not be shared with or sold to any third-party. The HMP will only use your email for the purpose of establishing an account and contacting you in case an issue arises with your contribution.

The HMP is a moderated collection, and submissions will be reviewed before being released on the public website. The HMP has no obligation to use your material.  The HMP reserves the right to modify, expand, and otherwise edit the metadata, description, and descriptive information supplied by the user for the purposes of curating the collection and making the item easily accessible.

By agreeing to the Terms of Use and submitting material to the HMP, you are certifying that you have full rights, or have obtained permission, for the publication of this item and the information you provide about it. Should someone request that an item be removed from the website, the request will be reviewed and the item may be taken down.

We cannot return any material you submit to us so be sure to keep a copy.

You retain ownership of and copyright in the material you share, but you may choose to allow others to re-use it by assigning a Creative Commons license. By default, Creative Commons licenses require that your work is cited and attributed. You can also indicate whether you will allow commercial uses of your work, allow others to make derivative versions of your work, or require that others re-using your work adopt the same licensing terms that you selected. The HMP will attach the appropriate Creative Commons license, or no license at all, based on the preferences you indicate at the bottom of our Contribution form. For more information, please visit https://creativecommons.org/.

(Terms adapted from the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, September 11 Digital Archive and Our Marathon)