We work closely with the academic community to support real-world teaching, research and application of our content and technology, in and out of the classroom.
View case studies below exploring how librarians and professors integrate primary source collections into their teaching and research, using examples from a variety of Adam Matthew Digital resources.
If you would like to explore our various support services, please get in touch to discuss your needs with our academic outreach team, or find out more here.
Gender: Identity and Social Change in PhD research at Queen’s University
The Munby Collection was originally going to form a chapter in a wider project, but when McTavish discovered Adam Matthew Digital was digitising the collection in the database Gender: Identity and Social Change, she was able to devote her entire project to the archive.
Empire Online at the University of Southampton
Dr Christopher Prior, an Associate Professor in Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Southampton, has integrated Adam Matthew Digital’s Empire Online into a third-year special subject module taken by History students in their final year.
Curated Image Exhibition
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. This activity may be adapted easily to various courses in not only literature but also other disciplines, like history, theater arts, even business and medicine, to provide students with alternative points of entry to core documents.
The Creative Archive: Teaching Creative Writing with Online Primary Sources
Discover how Professor Christine Wiesenthal is using digital primary source collections as sources for stories, characters, and dialogue in creative writing programmes at the University of Alberta.
Digital Primary Sources in Teaching
We talk with Wendy Mears a Learning and Teaching Librarian at The Open University about how digital primary sources fit into an online environment.
Teaching with Confidential Print: Middle East at Liverpool John Moores University
Professor Katherine Harbord integrated Confidential Print: Middle East, a title in Adam Matthew Digital’s Archives Direct platform, into her teaching in order to help students develop their primary source analysis skills and to increase their familiarity with an archive environment.
Teaching ‘History of The Civil Rights Movement’ with African American Communities and Race Relations in America
Researching and contextualising primary documents are the foundations of history instruction.
What defines a city’s public space? Who designates such areas, who determines their uses, and who gets to use them?
Mass Observation Online at the University of Bristol
SOCI20064: Investigating the Social
The Investigating the Social module, open to second-year Sociology students, focusses on introducing different empirical research methods as well as the planning and undertaking of research using qualitative methods...
Going to the Source: Understanding Usage of Primary Source Materials Worldwide
Michael Levine-Clark
Dean, University of Denver Libraries
Until relatively recently, primary sources were buried deep within library collections and were often difficult to find. A scholar conducting research might visit a dozen archives or more to find the information she needed to complete a project...
Structuring a class around Adam Matthew’s Colonial America collection
Professor Jessica Stern
Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton
Dr Jessica Stern, Professor of History at Cal State Fullerton, built her whole class around Adam Matthew’s Colonial America database, and the documents within it, which come from the CO5 series ...
Case Study: Shakespeare in Performance at the University of Toronto
Doctoral research student at the University of Toronto
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...
Case Study: Socialism on Film at the University of Iowa
HIST 1010:0008: History Matters – The Russian Revolution of 1917
Dr Michael Zmolek, the lecturer running the course, had not previously taught using films from an archive as primary source materials. However, the films in Socialism on Film provided an opportunity...
The Empire Will Not Be Your Priest
This piece was written by a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Alberta.
In this assignment, the students were asked to explore any Adam Matthew Digital database to find a seed story: any primary source that sparked the student’s imagination with the potential to be explored in a longer piece of creative non-fiction.
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 Adam Matthew Digital’s India, Raj and Empire database for inspiration.
