Jisc and Adam Matthew Collaborate to Provide Access to ‘Migration To New Worlds’ to All UK He/Fe Institutions

Migration to New Worlds (www.migration.amdigital.co.uk), a collection of materials on the ‘Century of Immigration’, is to be made freely available to all UK academics and students in higher (HE) and further (FE) education institutions from January 2016 thanks to a collaboration between Jisc and Adam Matthew.

Market research conducted by both Adam Matthew, a leading provider of digital content for the humanities and social sciences and Jisc, the UK higher, further education and skills sectors’ not-for-profit organisation for digital services and solutions, identified Migration to New Worlds as having relevance to contemporary society and responding to many undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the UK covering the subject of immigration. This was from an inter-disciplinary point of view and includes the subjects of history, geography, anthropology, sociology, politics, cultural studies and English.

Collection materials include unique primary source material on the ‘Century of Immigration’ (1800-1924): a period when hundreds of thousands of migrants left their homelands in Great Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe, India, China, Japan and other Asian countries to start new lives in the United States, Canada and Australasia.

Materials include unique diaries, personal letters, oral histories and journals; each narrating the intimate journeys and challenges immigrants faced when settling in foreign countries.
Andrew Linn academic at the University of Sheffield comments: “This ambitious resource allows students and scholars to understand, perhaps for the first time, the individual, personal and local stories which underlie the impersonal, statistical and global history of migration.”

As well as making the product available to the entire UK academic and student community for free, and as part of the shared commitment to improving accessibility to archival sources, this agreement will also see up to ten percent of the content available to the UK general public.

Paola Marchionni, Head of digital resources for teaching, learning and research at Jisc, said:
“This is an important collaboration for Jisc in its mission to make digital resources as widely available and accessible as possible. We have worked closely with Adam Matthew not only to explore new and more efficient ways of procuring digital collections for our customers, but also to support discovery and openness by ensuring that the metadata and up to ten percent of the content are openly available in the UK.”

Managing Director of Adam Matthew, Khal Rudin, added:
“We are delighted to be involved with this ground-breaking initiative, which is enabling our latest flagship resource to be accessed by all HE and FE institutions in the United Kingdom. We are also very pleased to have this opportunity to inspire and assist teaching and research in the UK.”

UK HE and FE institutions wishing to take up a free subscription to Migration to New Worlds can do so from the Jisc Collections web site https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Catalogue/Overview/index/2366