Case studies

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.

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, 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.”

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.

At the time of this case study, Emma McTavish was a PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Ontario, with a specialism in Victorian literature, life writing, gender and sexuality.