University of Liverpool: Revolutionising library initiatives with AM Quartex

Since signing with AM Quartex in 2023, the University of Liverpool have been quick to leverage our platform to enhance access and discovery of some of the most well-used and loved collections held at their Libraries, Museums and Galleries.

Since staging a soft launch of their Digital Heritage Lab on AM Quartex a mere three months after joining our community, University of Liverpool officially launched their site earlier this year and have since continued to take an iterative approach, regularly adding to their collections’ scope and incorporating several new exhibits.

Always keen to implement newly released features, University of Liverpool have also been one of the earliest adopters of our new Preservica API, an integration that allows Preservica customers to ingest material directly from their preservation environment into their AM Quartex client.

On Friday 6 September, Cunard’s flagship Queen Mary 2 returned to Liverpool to celebrate its 400th transatlantic crossing. This was the first time that a Cunard ship had visited Liverpool since the historic naming ceremony of its newest ship, Queen Anne took place in June. In celebration of this milestone achievement by a Cunard liner, the University of Liverpool have leveraged the Preservica integration to ingest Cunard’s original transatlantic passenger lists into AM Quartex.The Cunard archive at the University of Liverpool is a unique and intellectual treat with business records, passenger memorabilia and advertisement content accompanied by historic passenger lists. The archive of the Cunard Steamship Company contains most of the surviving business records produced by Cunard since it became a limited company in 1878 and is a unique resource for researching Cunard’s growth and development.

A carefully curated Cunard – Travel in Style digital exhibition has also been assembled in Quartex to provide important contextual information around some of the collection’s advertising highlights.

AM Quartex’s integration with Preservica has allowed the University of Liverpool to reimagine their digital infrastructure and align two integral institutional objectives – to simultaneously preserve and publish their collections online with enhanced viewing, search and discovery capabilities. Joanne also acknowledged that it was a huge appeal for Liverpool that AM Quartex “has tools built into it that enables us to advance at a much quicker rate than would be possible if we had to build or integrate tools ourselves".

This integration speaks to just one of these ‘tools’ that the University of Liverpool have been keen to utilise. Since the integration was released earlier this summer, Liverpool’s team have been busy loading digitised Cunard content into Preservica, then via the integration, utilising the API to effortlessly ingest these files in AM Quartex where their metadata can be managed and records configured for display.

Spurred on by their success using this integration, the University of Liverpool will next be exploring further integration opportunities between AM Quartex and interactive map platform HuMap, as well as continuing to grow their list of available digitised collections on their site.