The following consists of information about how to access ALOT content, our take-down and copyright policy information, and how to properly cite content on this website in your research.

Protected Content

A portion of the interviews in the collection are restricted for reasons related to copyright and the privacy of interviewees, as stipulated in collection and hosting agreements. This protected content is viewable online but only for research purposes with the express permission of ALOT and Simon Fraser University Library. Potential researchers must complete a Research Agreement and may not publish work based on these materials containing any private or personally identifying information. Collections with protected content currently include:

• The Bedside Table Archives (all)
• Tough Ladies and Troublemakers (selected)
• Lesbian Generations in Vancouver (selected)
• Katie Gilmartin (selected)

If you would like to submit a Research Agreement and view protected content in the collection for research purposes, or have any questions about privacy or ALOT’s restriction procedures, please contact us.

Copyright & Creative Commons

ALOT supports Creative Commons and its spirit of creativity, innovation, and engagement, and the use of Creative Commons licenses can help to resolve some of the ownership issues encountered in oral history practice. We have selected as our default license the Attribution, Non-commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. It allows people to use the recordings and transcripts that are publicly available on the ALOT website, to share them with others, and to remix, tweak, and build upon those Works, as long as they credit (attribute) the owner and use them non-commercially. For more information about this license, read a plain language summary and view the legal code (the full license). All materials available on the ALOT site are licensed through this CC BY-NC 4.0 license, unless otherwise noted. ALOT does not hold copyright for all materials available on the ALOT site. Some donors transfer all rights to ALOT/SFU, but for the majority of materials donated to or hosted by ALOT, the donor retains all copyrights, moral rights and other intellectual and proprietary rights he/she holds in the material and grants Simon Fraser University a nonexclusive right to authorize all uses of these materials, subject to any privacy and consent restrictions or any other restrictions, for non-commercial research, scholarly, or other educational purposes pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (BY-NC) license. In some cases, ALOT has obtained permission from third-party copyright holders in order to digitize and make materials available online. ALOT does not hold any rights to contributions uploaded by users directly to the ALOT site, and users must also agree to CC BY-NC 4.0 licenses for their uploaded materials before they are made available online. Please contact us if you have any questions about copyright. Watch our Copyright and Creative Commons Information video below for more information.

For more information about properly attributing CC-licensed material, see the Creative Commons Wiki.

Research and Citing ALOT Resources

Any materials in the collection used for research (publications, essays, blog posts, etc.) should be properly cited. For the most part, materials on the site are unpublished works (excepting radio and TV programs) and must be cited accordingly. A suggested Chicago Style citation for unpublished interviews is: Interviewee Lastname, Firstname. (identifying information). Interview by interviewer firstname lastname. Interview Month/Day/Year. Interview collection, Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony, Simon Fraser University. Burnaby, BC. URL. For more information, see Western Oregon University's or the University of Kentucky Libraries' Nunn Center for Oral History's citation guides for unpublished materials/oral history interviews. For more information about conducting archival research, see the links on our Resources page.

Take-Down Policy

Before making content available online, ALOT takes steps to ensure that the correct permissions (including copyright and consent) are obtained. However, permissions related to archival records (and especially oral history) can be complicated, and ALOT recognizes that issues may arise, including but not limited to: copyright; the disclosure of personal data; defamatory content; or errors. If you have any concerns about content on this site, please contact us with information about: the exact content in question (URL); the nature of your complaint or concern; and your relationship to this complaint or concern (e.g. copyright holder, third party named in an interview, etc.). ALOT will work to resolve the issue, which may include removing or restricting the content if correct permissions cannot be obtained.