Community engagement
AM connects and works with a wide range of researchers, scholars, archivists and community experts on our products, to ensure that each one is informed by expert opinions.
We recognise the publishing industry’s responsibility to increase both the diversity of voices involved in the publishing process and those represented in our products, and our own responsibility within this. As part of our mission to better engage and connect with communities in the representation of their histories and experiences, we are working to make our internal processes more transparent and increase the diversity of the voices who advise us.
Working with archival partners
We fund digitisation for all the content we seek to include and work with, as well as working with specialists in rare and fragile material to ensure that the physical material is preserved for future use. We work with our archival partners to provide expert advice on enhanced metadata and bespoke indexing. All partner archives receive royalties as remuneration for their contribution, which many use to reinvest in expanding their collections, preservation and digitisation efforts within the archive
Find out more about our partnerships
Working with the scholarly community
From our inception, AM has been committed to working with experts around the globe to advise and guide us in creating primary source collections. We form Editorial Boards for each collection, comprised of experts from the academic community, archives and heritage communities, who guide us and advocate for the communities represented by the material.
As part of our commitment to increasing the diversity of voices we present, AM is dedicated to expanding our editorial boards to ensure that we increase representation and amplify voices of marginalised communities. This will help us ensure that diverse interests and perspectives are represented throughout the creation of our products.
To ensure that AM is continually learning from the academic community in which we participate we have formed a number of Advisory Boards to feedback and support the creation of inclusive products. These Advisory Boards work with us to interrogate academic discourse, current scholarship and the dissemination of knowledge.
A key aspect of these Advisory Boards is to work with us on ensuring that our products are accessible, sustainable and inclusive. We intend to use the guidance from our Advisory Boards to create toolkits which will guide all our teams in working inclusively in all processes. These toolkits in turn will allow us to create guides for finding marginalised and silenced narratives and voices in our primary source content for our users.
Working with communities across the globe
In order to ensure that we are addressing the needs of a diverse global education and heritage community, AM will be consciously building a diverse network of community consultants to partner with us on new projects going forward. Working with the diverse communities that we are looking to represent, these consultants will inform our collections with greater understanding and knowledge about the issues and topics that impact on those communities.
Enhancing research opportunities
AM is also partnering with digital scholarship initiative COVE on the One More Voice project to recover non-European contributions from nineteenth-century British imperial and colonial archives. One More Voice is attempting to offer a critical and systematic evaluation of these rich and diverse materials by using interpretive approaches and digital preservation techniques to expand existing scholarship.
As part of our commitment to enabling and enhancing research opportunities, we work with our archival partners and customers to offer free access to a range of organisations. Our goal is to share the digitised versions of primary source content with not only communities who have created these sources, but also whose narratives are included in or silenced by the sources. Together with our archival partners, we work to determine the best methods for communicating and enabling this access to key communities.
Indigenous Newspapers in North America
It was vital that the communities and tribes who created and featured in these newspapers could view them. We worked with Tribal Colleges, Universities and Museums across the US to set up free access so that researchers could view 200 years of North American Indigenous journalism online.
East India Company
It is history from the perspective of the British Empire, and not the millions of people affected by the decisions, strategies and corruption of what began as a simple trading company. The National Archives of India now has free access to all modules, so researchers and scholars in India can view the documents that had a fundamental impact on their country and history.
Ethnomusicology
We worked with a number of ethnomusicologists to identify communities and people who contributed to the collection. Free access was then set up in libraries, museums and even people’s homes. This has provided an opportunity for those with connections to the recordings to search and browse the material and find their own personal stories within them.