This article was originally published in UCSB’s ‘The Current‘.
Many more doors to history, culture, politics and the arts have opened at UCSB Library with the recent expansion of its digital collection related to humanities and social sciences.
The library has licensed the entire suite at AM, a digital publisher of unique primary source collections from around the world. Formerly named Adam Mathew, AM works with leading libraries, archives and research institutions to make their wide-ranging materials available online to scholarly communities.
The AM collection broadly spans humanities and social science disciplines and is composed of unique archives worldwide, from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to Britain, Europe and the Americas. Spanning centuries, the suite’s themes include cultural and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality, empire and war, and history, politics and literature, among others. Features and content include video, audio, 360-degree objects, data visualization and mapping.
The acquisition bodes well for researchers who rely on primary source material, as original historical research typically requires traveling to distant archives, navigating cost-prohibitive interlibrary loans and adjusting a project’s scope accordingly. For students engaged in a senior honors thesis or a graduate seminar, for example, these logistical barriers frequently stifle academic curiosity before research even begins.
“The depth and range of AM’s collections means students can pursue independent, evidence-based scholarship across disciplines,” said Chizu Morihara, the library’s director of collection strategies.
The scope of the AM suite has opened new possibilities, according to Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian Heather Nisen, who has added the AM resources to her research guides for upper-division classes, thesis seminars and graduate students.
“These archives completely level the playing field,” Nisen said. “Students can now interrogate rare global documents from their laptops, sparking breakthroughs that used to require expensive travel.”
Embedding digital archives directly into the research pathways students already use is central to the library’s commitment to supporting deep, original scholarship, she added.
So far, according to librarians, some of the most viewed AM collections have been Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America, Africa and the New Imperialism and A Global History of Epidemics, 1800-1970.
Like other licensed digital collections, the AM suite is available to UCSB faculty, staff and students, as well as researchers visiting the UCSB Library in person.
