Terms of Service
These are the rules for using Collectors Catalogues. We have tried to write them in plain English rather than legalese, because terms nobody can read protect nobody. By creating an account you agree to them.
Who we are
Collectors Catalogues is an app for private collectors to catalogue antiques, relics, and artifacts with museum-grade care — recording what a thing is, where it came from, and how confident you are about both.
The service is independently operated from Canada. You can reach us any time at collectorscatalogues@gmail.com. When paid memberships launch, this section will name the registered operating entity.
Who may use it
You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. If you are younger than that, you are welcome to use the app with a parent or guardian who holds the account.
One account per person. Keep your password to yourself — you are responsible for what happens under your account, so tell us straight away if you think someone else has access to it.
What you catalogue is yours
Your records, photographs, sketches, and notes remain entirely your property. We claim no ownership of them.
You do give us the permission we need to actually run the service: to store your content, and to display it to the people you have chosen to show it to. If you set a museum to public, that permission extends to showing it publicly; if it is hidden, it does not. That permission ends when you delete the content, except for the limited records described under "The permanent record" below.
Only upload photographs you took or otherwise have the right to use.
Record honestly
The whole point of this app is a record that can be trusted. Mark reproductions as reproductions, use the confidence levels honestly, and never invent a provenance.
Deliberately falsifying a record — inventing an origin, passing off a reproduction, or fabricating a chain of ownership — is grounds for removing the record and, if repeated, the account.
What is not allowed
Cataloguing objects you obtained illegally, or that were looted, stolen, or removed from a protected site or burial ground.
Using the app to buy, sell, trade, or advertise objects. Collectors Catalogues is a catalogue, not a marketplace, and it will not become one.
Posting another person’s private information, harassing or abusing other collectors, impersonating anyone, or uploading unlawful or hateful content.
Scraping, bulk-downloading, or automatically harvesting other collectors’ records or findspot data.
Attempting to break, overload, or gain unauthorised access to the service.
You are responsible for the law where you are
Heritage, detecting, excavation, export, and reporting laws differ enormously from place to place, and they apply to you regardless of what this app does. Nothing in Collectors Catalogues — including its field guides — is legal advice.
It is your responsibility to know and follow the rules where you search and where you live. The Collector’s Code inside the app is a starting point, not a substitute for looking them up.
The permanent record
Some things are deliberately permanent, because a register that can be quietly rewritten is worth very little:
Identification numbers are never reused. If an item is removed, its number retires with it.
Provenance entries are append-only. You may revise entries you wrote yourself while you still own the item, but you cannot edit or delete entries written by anyone else. Corrections are made by adding a new entry.
When an item is transferred to another collector, the record is frozen as a snapshot at the moment of handover, so its history cannot be rewritten afterwards.
If, when you delete your account, you choose to leave your entries on the register, they stay too — anonymised and credited to “a former collector” — and you give us your permission to keep displaying them that way indefinitely.
These records may survive the deletion of your account in the limited form described in the Privacy Policy.
No valuations, no guarantees about objects
Any valuation you record is your own private estimate. We do not appraise, authenticate, or verify anything, and nothing in the app should be treated as an appraisal or a guarantee of authenticity.
Identifications offered by other collectors on the Identification board are opinions offered in good faith by other members of the public, not expert determinations — even when the person offering one carries a professional marker.
Membership and payment
The core of Collectors Catalogues is free and is intended to stay that way: recording finds, the Identification board, provenance, the field guides, and access to your own data.
Curator’s Membership is an optional paid subscription that adds scale (more items and museums) and craft extras. Membership never buys rank points, professional status, prominence on the board, or access to anyone else’s data.
When paid membership launches it will be billed through the app store you installed from, on the terms shown at purchase. Cancellations, renewals, and refunds are handled by that store under its own policies, not by us. If your membership lapses, member-only presentation (such as a museum theme) simply stops being displayed — your records and photographs are never deleted or locked away because you stopped paying.
Moderation and ending an account
Collectors can report content. We may remove content or suspend an account that breaks these terms — and in serious cases, such as looted material or harassment, without warning.
You may stop using the service at any time. See "Your rights and choices" in the Privacy Policy for how to get your data out and how to have your account removed.
We may also discontinue the service. If we ever do, we will give reasonable notice and a window to export your records, because your catalogue should outlive our involvement in it.
The service is provided as it is
We work to keep Collectors Catalogues running and your data safe, but we cannot promise it will always be available, uninterrupted, or free of faults, and we do not guarantee that anything another collector posts is accurate.
Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. The app can export your full catalogue at any time, and that export is free for everyone.
To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses. Nothing here limits liability that cannot legally be limited — including for death, personal injury, or fraud.
Changes to these terms
If we change these terms in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you in the app or by email before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new terms.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of Nova Scotia, Canada, and the courts there have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not remove any protection you have under the law of the country where you live.