The Community of Online Research Assignments (CORA) is an open educational resource (OER) administered by the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University ("LMU", "we", "us"). CORA respects the privacy of our website visitors and registered contributors across the global academic community (including the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, Australia, and worldwide). This Privacy Policy governs the collection, processing, use, and protection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) collected through the CORA website (projectcora.org). LMU complies with applicable data protection legislation, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the California Consumer Privacy Act / California Privacy Rights Act (CCPA/CPRA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR / UK GDPR), the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs).
1. Purpose & Scope
This Privacy Policy covers the treatment of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) created, collected, stored, or processed through the CORA platform. You may browse public educational resources on CORA without registering or providing personal data. Users provide personal data to CORA when creating a contributor account, submitting pedagogical lesson plans, participating in platform discussions, or contacting site administrators. This policy applies strictly to CORA-operated digital properties and does not extend to external, third-party websites or services to which CORA may link.
2. Information We Collect & How It Is Used
2.1 Information you provide directly.
We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide when interacting with the CORA platform:
- Contributor Account Details: Full name, email address, username, password (encrypted), and institutional affiliation.
- Optional Contributor Profile Data: Professional title, biographical summary, profile photo, and professional links.
- Contributed Educational Assets: Lesson plans, teaching resources, and user comments.
Institutional Affiliation Privacy Notice: Providing your institutional affiliation is required during registration to verify academic community membership and prevent automated spam. By default, your institution is marked "Private" and is NOT displayed in the public Contributor Directory. You may choose to display your institutional affiliation on your public contributor profile by enabling the visibility setting within your account preferences.
2.2 Information collected automatically & Web Analytics.
When you browse CORA, our web servers and analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics) automatically log technical usage telemetry, including your IP address, browser type, operating system, device characteristics, referring URLs, and page navigation timestamps. This information is processed in aggregate to maintain system security, assess site performance, and improve user experience. CORA does not sell this data or combine it with external databases to identify individual visitors.
2.3 Contributor Directory & Prohibition of AI Scraping / Commercial Harvesting
The CORA Contributor Directory is provided solely for non-commercial academic networking, pedagogical collaboration, and scholarly exchange.
- Harvesting & Scraping Ban: Contributor contact details, email addresses, directory profiles, and educational metadata may not be harvested, mined, extracted, or collected by any manual or automated mechanisms (including web scrapers, spiders, or crawlers).
- AI Model Training Prohibition: Scraping or utilizing CORA contributor data, personal profiles, or pedagogical materials for the purpose of training, retraining, fine-tuning, or validating commercial Artificial Intelligence (AI) foundation models or Large Language Models (LLMs) without express written authorization from LMU is strictly prohibited.
3. Cookies & Tracking Technologies
CORA utilizes essential session cookies and optional analytics cookies to enhance platform functionality:
- Essential Session Cookies: Required to maintain your authenticated contributor session, secure forms, and remember interface preferences.
- Analytics Cookies: Help us understand aggregate user traffic patterns and optimize open educational resource delivery.
You may control or disable cookies through your web browser settings. Disabling essential cookies may impact your ability to log in or manage your contributor account. CORA does not deploy cross-context behavioral advertising tracking cookies.
4. Sharing of Information
CORA uses the personal information you provide to record and support your activities within the site and its services, to inform you about CORA and its activities and events, and to support your participation in programs. CORA does not sell, rent, or trade your personal information.
Service providers.
Personal information about CORA users may occasionally be shared with third-party service providers and contractors who help us operate CORA—such as our web development and hosting vendor, email or communication services, and analytics providers—as well as auditors, consultants, collaborators, and partners engaged to assist with financial, evaluation, or operational activities. We inform these recipients about safeguarding personal information and require them to use it only for authorized purposes consistent with this policy. Information is returned to CORA or destroyed upon completion of the project or activity.
Legal disclosures.
We cannot guarantee that your personal information will never be disclosed to third parties. For example, we may be legally obligated to disclose information to government authorities or others under certain circumstances, or third parties may unlawfully circumvent our security measures. CORA reserves the right to change this policy and will provide notice prior to doing so.
5. Data Retention & Account Deletion
CORA retains your account profile information for as long as your contributor account remains active.
- Account Deletion: You may request account deletion at any time. Upon account deletion, your personal login credentials, contact information, and private profile data will be permanently purged from active databases within thirty (30) days.
- Contributed Open Educational Resources (OER): Contributed pedagogical lesson plans and teaching resources that you voluntarily published under Creative Commons (CC) or open licenses will remain available in CORA's public educational repository to preserve academic continuity for educators worldwide. However, author attribution will be unlinked, anonymized, or updated upon request. Please note that while we can unlink your account and anonymize authorship, we are not able to automatically detect or remove personal information that you may have included within the body of your contributed content or uploaded files (such as PDFs). If you have included personal information within your content and wish to have it removed, please contact us to make a special request.
- Archival Backups: System backup snapshots are retained and systematically overwritten per ITS backup retention procedures, consistent with the LMU Records Retention & Disposal Policy.
6. Information Security Standards
LMU implements robust administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect CORA data against unauthorized access, loss, or alteration. All contributor passwords are cryptographically hashed, and data transmitted between your browser and the CORA platform is secured using industry-standard Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.2 or higher, currently TLS 1.3 / HTTPS) encryption. In alignment with LMU’s Data Classification Policy, high-tier credentials and user databases are hosted in access-restricted, monitored cloud environments.
7. Your Rights and Choices
As a registered contributor, you can log in with your username and password at any time to view and change your personal information. You may also contact us to request that your personal information be corrected or removed from our database. We will make every effort to verify your identity before making changes in order to protect your privacy and security.
Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under applicable data-protection laws:
- If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you may have rights under the GDPR to access, correct, delete, restrict, or object to our processing of your personal data, and to data portability.
- If you are a California resident, you may have rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA), including the right to know what personal information we collect, to request deletion, and not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. CORA does not sell personal information.
To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the information below.
8. Contact Information & Governance
For questions regarding the CORA platform, educational contributions, or data privacy:
- For General CORA Inquiries, Submissions & Editorial Support: Susan Gardner Archambault Head of Reference & Instruction | William H. Hannon Library Loyola Marymount University Email: susan.archambault@lmu.edu
- For Data Privacy, DSAR Requests & Legal Inquiries: Information Security & Data Privacy Office Loyola Marymount University Email: dataprivacy@lmu.edu | Phone: (310) 568-6691
- For Copyright & DMCA Infringement Claims: Designated DMCA Copyright Agent Loyola Marymount University Email: dmca@lmu.edu | Web: https://www.lmu.edu/dmca
Last Updated: August 28, 2026