Terms of use

Platform ownership and copyright

The platform — its software, design, structure, taxonomy, interfaces and functionality — is © 2026 T M Stafford LLC. All rights reserved. No part of the platform may be copied, reproduced, reverse-engineered or redistributed without written permission. This is separate from the catalogued works themselves, whose rights remain with their original authors and publishers.

What the library is

A curated, non-commercial repository of research and practice surrounding M. David Merrill's work and the scholarship extending it. Records are catalogued and, where rights permit, link to or host the underlying material. The site is not affiliated with or endorsed by any publisher whose material it references.

Accounts

You are responsible for activity under your account and for keeping your sign-in secure. We may suspend accounts that abuse the service or breach these terms.

Contributions and rights

• You may only submit material you have the right to share. Do not upload works whose copyright you do not hold or have permission to distribute.
• Copyright in contributed works remains with the original authors and publishers. Cataloguing a work here does not transfer any rights.
• By submitting, you grant the library permission to store, index, summarise and display the record and any accompanying file for the purpose of running the catalogue.
• Curators may edit metadata, reclassify, decline or remove submissions to keep the catalogue accurate.

Takedown requests

If you are a rights holder and believe material here is published without permission, contact us with the record and the basis of your claim. We will review and remove material where the claim is substantiated.

Acceptable use

Do not attempt to break, overload or gain unauthorised access to the service; do not scrape in a way that degrades it for others; do not upload malware or unlawful content; and do not misrepresent the provenance of a work.

The Merrill Coach

The coach generates answers with a language model grounded in catalogue records. It can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and it is not professional, legal or academic advice. Verify citations against the underlying works before relying on them.

Developer API

The public API exposes published catalogue metadata for building tools and agents. Use it at a reasonable request rate, attribute The M. David Merrill Library as the source, and respect the rights of the underlying authors and publishers. We may change or withdraw endpoints; breaking changes are recorded in the changelog.

No warranty; limitation of liability

The service is provided "as is", without warranties of any kind. To the extent permitted by law, the operators are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from use of the site, its content or its API.

Changes

We may revise these terms; continued use after an update means you accept the revised version.

Contact

Questions, requests or takedown notices: contact@themerrilllibrary.org.