Working with AM editors
AM editors combine passion for archival materials, the humanities and social sciences with a heartfelt belief that digitisation widens access to historically significant content.
AM’s Editorial team is committed to publishing resources that fulfil the research needs of the academic community. Made up of two departments, Development and Production, they both work closely with archival partners to create AM collections.
Working with Editorial Development
Our team of highly skilled development editors are responsible for conceptualising resources and licencing archival material from our partners.
Spending time in the archive is key and we carry out full physical reviews of all archival material prior to digitisation. This work allows us to understand the content and conservation needs of collections, and ensures archival materials are safely digitised.
We take a bespoke approach to developing resources. We acknowledge that every repository and archival collection is different, and we’re responsive to the needs of our partners.
We involve archival partners from the earliest point of resource development, sharing our resource vision and research themes we seek to cover to ensure it meets the needs of the scholarly community.
We seek advice from archival partners about suitable collections, consulting curators and special collections librarians to understand which materials fit the resource parameters or are well used by patrons.
The Editorial Development team collaborate with archives and libraries to commission AM resources.
There are many benefits to participating in an AM resource. We fund digitisation, remunerate archives for their participation, provide high quality digital surrogates and new metadata, and commit to marketing the resource worldwide.
Working with Editorial Production
Production editors take archival material from physical to digital form to create a resource that meets the needs of students, researchers, and instructors. The team works closely with the source archive on handling, conservation needs and digitisation.
We arrange for specialist scanning or heritage digitisation support, and rigorously check that images generated from this process are fit for use. This hands-on process gives the project teams an in-depth understanding of the content published in each title.
We commission essays, exhibitions, and video interviews from subject experts to contextualise the primary source material, drawing out key documents and highlighting diverse narratives.
We work closely with our in-house software engineers to enhance the user experience and showcase the sources using innovative features within the AM Quartex platform, including OCR for printed material and HTR for manuscripts.
We create detailed and robust metadata for the materials to aid discovery and navigation, working with the archive and adding further bibliographic information such as content descriptions, themes, subjects or keywords.