Case studies

Dr. Matthias Wong, National University of Singapore, teaches a module in digital humanities methodologies to support students across a wide range of subjects using AM Research Skills.

The University of Portland consolidated its digital assets and Scholarly Institutional Repository into a single, unified platform using AM Quartex, addressing inefficiencies and improving user experience. This transformation eliminated information silos, streamlined workflows and significantly enhanced the accessibility and discoverability of digital assets for both administrators and end-users.

Professor María Cecilia Zuleta shows how Confidential Print: Latin America has advanced multidisciplinary research at El Colegio de México, analysing links between foreign trade, economic modernisation, and the rise of fossil-based economies.

AM has partnered with Preservica, a global leader in Active Digital Preservation archiving. The collaboration will result in an integration that offers libraries and archives a well-rounded digital ecosystem to protect and publish their digital assets.

Brian Atwater, Affiliate Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, utilised AM’s Colonial Caribbean digital collection to delve into historical geological events. His research focuses on the potential impact of a pre-Columbian tsunami on Anegada in the British Virgin Islands.

The University of Liverpool embark on the next stage of their library’s ‘digital shift’ with AM Quartex’s latest integration.

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. Professor Tamara Chaplin from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign shares how they have used their Impact status to maximise user engagement.

Learn from two librarians whose institutions have successfully integrated AM Explorer Arts & Humanities 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 had not previously taught using archival film as primary sources. However, Socialism on Film provided an opportunity for integration into his class programme in a way that introduced primary sources to students unfamiliar with them.

Arlynda, a doctoral research student at the University of Toronto, documents the writing of a dissertation on how actors annotate scripts, using digitised records from major Shakespeare companies and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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 spaces? Who designates them and who determines their uses? Robert Cassanello investigates 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.”

This activity was developed initially for an undergraduate course on Shakespeare. A primary aim was to engage students, who included majors and non-majors in English, in the generation of knowledge about the multiple and changing significations ascribed to Shakespeare’s plays.

Dr Christopher Prior, an Associate Professor in Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Southampton, has integrated AM’s Empire Online into a third-year special subject module taken by History students in their final year.

Mary Atkinson, Digital Assets Management Technician, and Shelley Hawrychuk, Chief Librarian, both at the University of Toronto Mississauga Library (UTML), share their experiences partnering with the AM Quartex team.

Based in Fort Worth, TX, the Eunice and James L. West Library at Texas Wesleyan University chose Quartex to unite its institutional holdings and special collections, creating a single, user-friendly repository for its user community. The resulting digital collections site is “everything we hoped it would be, and more”, according to Elizabeth A. M. Howard, Library Director, and Caitlin Rookey, Digital Initiatives Librarian.

As Ashley Todd-Diaz, Assistant University Librarian, explains, Quartex helped Towson University’s Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) to transform its learning provision for students using archival resources.

Darryl Stuhr, Director for Digitization and Digital Preservation Services in the Library and Academic Technology Services Group at Baylor University, discusses the process of migrating from CONTENTdm to Quartex.

Emma McTavish, formerly a PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Ontario, relates the transformational impact of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology on her research into Victorian literature, life writing, gender, and sexuality.