Case studies

The City of Burlington is committed to preserving its history and cultural heritage for future generations. As part of this mission, Burlington Public Library makes it a priority to digitise materials that document the history of Burlington and its people.

Securing long-term support for its cultural heritage collections is central to the mission of Samford University Library and a catalyst for its migration to AM Quartex.

AM Impact customers are those who have purchased perpetual access to the complete AM portfolio, empowering them to access numerous benefits, including exclusive discounted pricing. The AM Engagement team spoke with Professor Tamara Chaplin from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign to discover how they have used their recent Impact status to maximise user engagement.

In July 2020, AM hosted a webinar with two librarians whose institutions have successfully integrated AM Explorer into their library systems and services. Jeff Liszka, Department Liaison for Arts and Humanities at Trinity College, Connecticut, and Dr Hope Williard, Academic Subject Librarian at University of Lincoln, UK. 

Saloni Sharma’s piece, “The Empire Will Not Be Your Priest”, was one five student seed stories that turned into final end-of-term writing projects, using AM’s India, Raj and Empire database for inspiration.

Dr Michael Zmolek, the lecturer in the History Matters course, had not previously taught using films from an archive as primary source materials. However, the films in Socialism on Film provided an opportunity for integration into the class programme in a way that introduced primary sources to students unfamiliar with the historical study.

Arlynda, a Doctoral research student at the University of Toronto, was writing a dissertation on how actors annotate scripts. Most supporting research was done using the archives of major Shakespeare companies, with historical research undertaken at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D C, which holds a comprehensive archive relevant to this project.

Professor Jessica Stern, Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton shared her experiences teaching with AM's collection Colonial America and the impact it had on the students.

AM’s Mass Observation Online collection includes unique diaries written by volunteers. Each is anonymous and diarists were encouraged to simply record their lives, feelings and opinions without a delegated structure or guide.

What defines a city’s public space? Who designates such areas, who determines their uses, and who gets to use them? In his book, To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville, Robert Cassanello investigated nineteenth-century Jacksonville to demonstrate that such questions have been part of urban life for more than a century.

Undergraduate survey course Tanzimat to Tahrir: The History of the Modern Middle East, available to second-year students at Liverpool John Moores University, considers the modern history of the Middle East from a chronological, thematic and historiographical perspective.

In an interview with The Guardian, the novelist Hilary Mantel spoke about the importance of the archive both for the novelist and the historian: “the historian and the biographer follow a trail of evidence, usually a paper trail.”