Terms of Service

1. About these Terms

These Terms govern your access to and use of ColonialRecord.com.au, The Colonial Record, and any related search tools, records, transcriptions, downloads, user lodgement tools, alerts, accounts, subscriptions, institutional access, and AI-assisted research features we make available from time to time.

By using the Service, creating an account, unlocking a record, lodging a document, subscribing to alerts, or otherwise accessing our content, you agree to these Terms.

If you do not agree, you must not use the Service.

2. The Service

The Colonial Record is a historical research platform. We help users locate, search, view, transcribe, cite, classify, and analyse historical Australian records, including historical government gazettes and user-lodged historical documents.

The Service may include:

• free search results and previews;
• paid record unlocks;
• corrected transcriptions;
• cropped notice scans;
• clean page views and downloads;
• citations and source references;
• searchable PDFs;
• extracted names, places, dates and entities;
• saved folders, notes, tags and exports;
• standing enquiries and email alerts;
• member plans, researcher plans and institutional access;
• AI-assisted research tools such as “Ask the Record”;
• user document lodgement, OCR, indexing and review tools; and
• any other research, archive, data, export, reporting or publication tools we introduce.

We may add, remove, rename, redesign, limit, suspend, replace or discontinue parts of the Service at any time, subject to any specific paid access rights you have already purchased and any rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law.

3. Historical records and accuracy

The Service deals with old, incomplete, damaged, inconsistent and machine-read historical material.

Unless we say otherwise, transcriptions, entity extraction, search matches, classifications, citations, summaries, previews, confidence ratings and AI answers may be produced or assisted by automated systems. They may contain errors, omissions, false matches, spelling variants, layout mistakes, date errors, page errors or uncertain readings.

We may show confidence labels, “possible match” labels, alternative readings, citation details, raw OCR, cropped scans, page images or other verification material. These are provided to help you assess the record, not as a guarantee that the material is complete or correct.

You should verify important findings against the original scan, page image, source citation and any other relevant records.

The Service is not legal, genealogical, historical, archival, financial, tax or professional advice.

4. Accounts

You may use some parts of the Service without an account. Other parts may require an account, email verification, payment, invitation, subscription, institutional access or other approval.

You are responsible for:

• giving us accurate account and contact information;
• keeping your login details secure;
• all activity under your account;
• promptly telling us about unauthorised access; and
• making sure your use of the Service complies with these Terms.

We may refuse, suspend, limit or close an account if we reasonably believe it has been used in breach of these Terms, for security reasons, for non-payment, because the account information is inaccurate, or because we need to protect the Service, users, records, contributors or third parties.

5. Age

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account or make a purchase, unless you have the consent and supervision of a parent or guardian.

If you use the Service on behalf of an organisation, society, library, institution, business or other entity, you confirm that you have authority to accept these Terms on its behalf.

6. Free search and previews

We may provide free search results, teaser pages, previews, confidence indicators, extracted names or places, partial citations, blurred images, snippets or other limited information.

Free results are provided to help users assess whether a record may be relevant. They are not guaranteed to show all available information about a record.

We may change what is free and what is paid at any time.

7. Paid unlocks

A paid unlock gives access to the unlocked record or notice and the materials we make available for that unlock. Depending on the record and current product design, this may include:

• the corrected transcription;
• the cropped notice scan;
• a clean page or page-image download;
• full citation details;
• raw OCR for comparison;
• extracted entities; and
• other related record data.

Unless the checkout page says otherwise, an unlock is for the specific record or notice identified at checkout.

For guest purchasers, access may be linked to the email address used at checkout. We may email you a re-access link. You are responsible for keeping that link secure. Anyone with the link may be able to access the unlocked material. We may not be able to revoke or replace a link once it has been shared.

Previously unlocked records may remain accessible after cancellation of a subscription or membership, unless we are required to remove access for legal, security, abuse, copyright, takedown or operational reasons.

8. Plans, memberships and subscriptions

We may offer free memberships, paid subscriptions, founding memberships, researcher plans, institutional access, trials, opening specials, credit offers, usage allowances, monthly limits, bulk unlocks, exports, commissioned reports, priority processing, or other plans.

The features, limits, prices and terms of a plan are those displayed at the time you subscribe or otherwise agree to that plan, subject to these Terms.

Unless we expressly say that a feature, allowance, price or rate is permanent or locked in, we may change plan features, allowances, limits, inclusions, exclusions, pricing and eligibility for future billing periods.

If we make a material change to a paid recurring plan, we will give reasonable notice where required by law or where reasonably practicable. If you do not agree to the change, you may cancel before the change takes effect.

If a page describes a plan, feature or subscription that is not yet available for purchase, that description is not an offer to supply it until we make checkout, invoicing or sign-up available for that plan.

9. Prices, GST and payment

Prices are in Australian dollars unless stated otherwise.

Prices are inclusive of GST where it applies. We are not currently registered for GST, so no GST applies to our prices at this stage. If we become registered for GST, prices shown will remain GST-inclusive.

Payments may be processed by third-party payment providers such as Stripe. We do not receive or store your full card details.

You authorise us and our payment provider to process the amounts shown at checkout, including any recurring charges for subscriptions you agree to.

We may refuse or cancel a transaction if we reasonably suspect fraud, misuse, error, unauthorised payment, breach of these Terms, or a technical issue.

10. Refunds, re-credits and cancellations

For single unlocks, if you believe the unlocked record is the wrong record or materially not as described, email us within 7 days. We may refund the unlock price or re-credit the unlock.

We may also offer more generous refunds or re-credits at our discretion.

Subscriptions may be cancelled at any time unless a specific plan says otherwise. Unless required by law or expressly stated at checkout, cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period and we do not provide pro-rata refunds for unused time.

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any consumer guarantee, right or remedy that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law.

11. Alerts and emails

You may be able to create standing enquiries or saved searches and receive email alerts when matching records are found.

You are responsible for ensuring that any alert terms you enter are lawful, appropriate and not designed to misuse the Service.

We may cap, throttle, suspend or delete alerts to manage abuse, cost, performance, deliverability, legal risk or product limits.

Each alert email will include a way to stop that alert or unsubscribe, where required. We may also send transactional emails about purchases, account access, security, receipts, support, lodgements and changes to the Service.

We will not add you to a marketing newsletter unless we have a lawful basis to do so.

12. Ask the Record and AI-assisted features

We may provide AI-assisted research features, including “Ask the Record”.

AI-assisted features may answer questions, summarise records, suggest connections, extract claims, classify material or provide citations to source evidence.

AI outputs may be wrong, incomplete, misleading, unsupported, out of date or affected by OCR errors, retrieval errors, search limitations, model limitations or source limitations.

You must verify AI outputs against the cited records and original images before relying on them.

We may impose quotas, character limits, cost limits, eligibility limits, account requirements, moderation rules, or other restrictions on AI-assisted features.

We may log questions, answers, sources, feedback, costs, tool steps and related metadata to operate, audit, improve and protect the feature.

You must not use AI-assisted features to generate unlawful content, harass people, identify or expose private information about living people, make automated decisions about people, or produce professional advice without proper human review.

13. Lodgement Office and user uploads

If we make document lodgement available, you may be able to upload historical documents for OCR, transcription, indexing, extraction, review and possible inclusion in the public Record.

We may set file-type, page, size, daily, account, subject-matter, quality, provenance or other limits.

You must not upload material unless:

• you have the right to upload it;
• you have the right to grant us the licence in these Terms;
• the material is genuinely historical;
• the material has a genuine connection to Australia or the scope of the Service;
• the material does not contain modern private information about living people, such as medical, financial, court, immigration or similarly sensitive records;
• the material is not unlawful, confidential, hateful, explicit, abusive, defamatory, infringing, official-secret, restricted, malicious or unsafe; and
• your description, provenance information and metadata are accurate to the best of your knowledge.

We may reject, quarantine, process, withhold, publish, unpublish, remove, relabel, modify, crop, redact, de-index or decline to use any lodged material at our discretion.

We may process a lodged document for the uploader without adding it to the public corpus.

We do not guarantee that lodged material will be accepted, processed, indexed, displayed, cited, credited, retained or made public.

14. Licence for lodged material

When you lodge a document, you grant us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable licence to host, store, copy, back up, display, publish, communicate, transmit, crop, redact, transcribe, OCR, correct, format, index, classify, extract data from, create searchable files from, create derivative research data from, include in search results, include in AI-assisted retrieval, cite, attribute, preserve and otherwise use the lodged material as part of The Colonial Record and related archival, research, product, safety and operational purposes.

This licence continues even if you later close your account, stop using the Service, or ask us to remove your personal account information.

You keep whatever rights you already have in the lodged material. We do not claim ownership of the original document merely because you lodge it.

Where practical, we will credit the lodged source in the way the Service displays source credits. Credit may be by name, account name, collection name, contributor name, source note, provenance note, or another reasonable form. We may decline, shorten or alter credit wording where necessary for safety, privacy, moderation, consistency or legal reasons.

You warrant that you have the rights needed to lodge the material and grant this licence. You agree to indemnify us against loss, cost, claim or liability arising from your breach of that warranty or from unlawful material you upload.

15. Takedowns and disputes about records

If you believe material on the Service infringes rights, breaches privacy, contains sensitive information about a living person, misattributes a source, or should not be displayed, contact us at office@colonialrecord.com.au.

We may ask for supporting information. We may remove, quarantine, redact, relabel, correct or retain the material, depending on the issue.

We are not required to remove historical public records merely because a person dislikes, disputes or is embarrassed by their contents, but we will consider legitimate legal, privacy, safety, copyright and source-rights concerns.

16. Your permitted use of unlocked content

Unless a plan, invoice, written agreement or record page says otherwise, you may use unlocked content for personal research, family history, academic research, citation, private study, reasonable professional research, and limited quotation or reproduction with appropriate attribution.

You must not, without our written permission:

• scrape, crawl, bulk download or systematically harvest the Service;
• build or assist a competing searchable database, index, OCR corpus, entity database, gazette product, archive product or research platform;
• resell, repackage, syndicate or commercially exploit unlocked content as a standalone product;
• remove attribution, source references, watermarks or notices;
• misrepresent our transcriptions, confidence ratings, citations or AI outputs as official records;
• use the Service to identify, harass, shame, target or expose living people;
• bypass paywalls, access controls, rate limits or security measures;
• share access credentials or institutional access outside the authorised group;
• overload, interfere with or reverse engineer the Service; or
• use the Service unlawfully.

Researcher, institutional, API, bulk export, commercial, library, society or commissioned-report arrangements may have additional written terms.

17. Intellectual property

The Service, website, design, code, search systems, corrected transcription layer, entity index, coordinates, classifications, confidence scoring, metadata, compiled datasets, AI workflows, exports, product copy, logos, trade marks and other materials we create are owned by us or licensed to us.

Historical source material may be public domain, Crown copyright, archive-supplied, user-lodged, licensed, or subject to other rights depending on the source. We do not grant rights beyond the rights we have or are able to grant.

You must comply with any source attribution, archive, copyright, moral rights, database, access or licence notices we display.

18. Feedback

If you send us feedback, corrections, suggested readings, tags, classifications, data improvements, bug reports, feature requests or similar contributions, you grant us a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use them to operate, improve, publish and commercialise the Service without payment to you.

19. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information.

By using the Service, you agree that we may collect, use, disclose and store information as described in the Privacy Policy.

20. Third-party services

The Service may rely on third-party providers for hosting, payments, OCR, AI processing, email delivery, backups, analytics, security, support or other functions.

We are not responsible for third-party services except to the extent required by law.

Your use of third-party payment pages, authentication tools, file viewers or other third-party features may also be subject to their terms and policies.

21. Availability and changes

We aim to keep the Service available, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted, error-free or permanent access.

We may suspend or limit access for maintenance, security, abuse prevention, upgrades, outages, data corrections, provider failures, legal compliance, cost control, safety or operational reasons.

Records, pages, downloads, search results, AI features, quotas, pricing, limits and plans may change over time.

22. Security

You must not test, scan, attack, bypass, overload, interfere with, reverse engineer, exploit or attempt unauthorised access to the Service.

If you discover a security issue, contact us promptly and do not disclose it publicly until we have had a reasonable opportunity to investigate and respond.

23. Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, consequential, special, incidental or economic loss, loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of data, loss of opportunity, reputational harm, research error, reliance on incorrect records, missed records, AI error, OCR error, citation error, source error, or interruption of access.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for claims arising from or relating to the Service is limited to the amount you paid us for the relevant product or service in the 12 months before the claim arose.

This limitation does not apply where liability cannot lawfully be limited, including under non-excludable consumer guarantees.

24. Australian Consumer Law

If you are a consumer under the Australian Consumer Law, our goods and services may come with guarantees that cannot be excluded.

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any right, guarantee, remedy or liability that cannot be excluded, restricted or modified by law.

Where we are allowed to limit a remedy, our liability is limited, at our option, to re-supplying the relevant service or paying the cost of having the service supplied again.

25. Indemnity

You indemnify us against loss, cost, damage, claim, liability or expense arising from:

• your breach of these Terms;
• your misuse of the Service;
• material you upload or lodge;
• your breach of rights in third-party material;
• your unlawful use of records or personal information; or
• your use of the Service on behalf of an organisation without authority.

This indemnity does not apply to the extent the loss is caused by our fraud, wilful misconduct or breach of law.

26. Ending your access

You may stop using the Service at any time. You may cancel subscriptions through the process we provide or by contacting us.

We may suspend, limit or terminate your access if we reasonably believe you have breached these Terms, created legal or operational risk, failed to pay, misused the Service, created security risk, or acted in a way that harms the Service, users, contributors, rights holders or third parties.

Sections dealing with intellectual property, lodged material licences, payment obligations, liability, indemnity, privacy, dispute resolution and any accrued rights survive termination.

27. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time.

For minor changes, the updated Terms apply when posted.

For material changes affecting paid recurring services, we will take reasonable steps to notify affected users before the change takes effect, where required by law or reasonably practicable.

If you continue using the Service after changes take effect, you accept the updated Terms.

28. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia.

The parties submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Victoria and the Commonwealth courts of Australia.

29. Contact

Questions, refunds, corrections, takedown requests, support requests and legal notices should be sent to: