ATG Interviews Martha Fogg Managing Director, AM

By Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Hub) and Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain)

ATG: You’ve held leadership roles across various areas of Adam Matthew Digital, now AM, over the last 20 years. What led you to your current position, and what excites you most about the work you’re doing today?

MF: I’ve always been driven by a fascination with the intersection of history, technology, and storytelling. Over the years at AM, I’ve been fortunate to work across multiple strands of our business strategy, giving me a deep understanding of how all the moving parts fit together to deliver something of real value to our customers. Underpinning every role and team at AM, from technology to customer support, is a unified purpose and sense of the meaning behind what we do. My role as Managing Director allows me to evolve and shape that vision, and I’m always so excited and inspired to see how our incredible staff find creative ways to interpret our mission.

ATG: AM has built a strong reputation for curating and digitizing rich primary source collections. How do you see the company’s mission evolving in today’s research and teaching environments?

MF: In the past, the focus was on digitisation as access — getting a fragile manuscript online so it could be used without damage. Then came understanding how technologies such as HTR could transform the ability to interrogate that material. Now, it’s about enabling deeper engagement: supporting digital scholarship, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and experiential learning which encourages curiosity, creativity and empathy as well as data and analysis.

Particularly exciting to me recently has been a greater emphasis on how primary sources can be used in STEM. Or perhaps more accurately, as a tool to demonstrate how the traditional barriers between STEM and arts and humanities study can be broken down.

ATG: As Managing Director, what strategic priorities are you focused on to ensure AM remains a leader in digital scholarship and archival innovation?

MF: Three stand out. First, ensuring our products remain exceptional, whether through the provision of unique, wellcurated, and globally relevant content collections, or through our Quartex technology platform. Second, harnessing technology to its fullest, but with a great sense of the responsibility we have to use it ethically and sustainably. And third, listening to our library and archive partners, and working with them to ensure that archival materials remain at the heart of brilliant research and teaching.

ATG: Critics sometimes argue that the commercialization of digitized archival content, particularly public domain or publicly funded collections, raises questions about equitable access. How does AM navigate the tension between offering valuable digital scholarship and ensuring broader public access to historical materials?

MF: It’s a fair and important question. We believe that investment in digitisation, curation, and technology adds real value in terms of discoverability, context, and preservation of these globally important materials. Often only achievable through commercial partnership with source archives. However we also recognise the importance of public access. We work closely with our content partners to balance these priorities. For example, many materials we digitise are made freely available in some form whether through open-access portals, community projects, or public exhibitions. And of course, our Quartex platform allows for libraries pursuing open-access goals to present their collections freely to users, whilst benefitting from our technology investment in our own platform.

ATG: What are some of the most exciting or unexpected ways you’ve seen AM’s collections used in classrooms or research projects?

MF: One of my favourites is seeing archival material inspire creative work. The poetry, art, exhibitions, and even community history projects that take the primary sources far beyond their original context. We’ve had some really interesting and inspiring research projects from different disciplines recently, such as analysis of Colonial Caribbean government papers to inform a project on historic climate modelling in the region. When you give students and researchers the freedom to explore, they’ll often find possibilities and stories that no one had considered before.

ATG: How do you select or prioritize new content areas or partnerships? Are there emerging fields or geographic regions that you’re especially excited about exploring?

MF: It’s a combination of listening and leading. We listen to our customers, academic advisors, and partners to understand where there are gaps or growing areas of interest. But we also try to lead by anticipating themes that will be important in the years ahead. Looking to the future I’m excited by the potential of building more collections that draw on global perspectives, twenty-first century histories, and science and technology. All spaces where the stories are both vital and timely.

ATG: In the push to digitize history, some argue that publishers often reinforce traditional narratives rather than challenge them. How does AM ensure its collections don’t just preserve elite or colonial voices, but also make space for marginalized perspectives?

MF: This is an area we’ve been very deliberate about. When we plan a collection, we actively seek out materials that expand the narrative. Whether that’s in the form of documents from grassroots movements, oral histories, or records from community archives. We also work with academic advisors who specialise in these perspectives, ensuring the editorial framework we build around a collection highlights multiple voices and contexts. We also try to be transparent and actively highlight where the historical record may be insufficient or biased, and suggest ways to read “against the grain.”

ATG: With AI advancing so rapidly, there’s growing concern that tech-driven solutions could devalue the curatorial expertise and human context that make archival collections meaningful. How do you see AM balancing innovation with thoughtful, human-led editorial work?

MF: For us, AI is a tool not a replacement. It offers transformative possibilities for interpreting and interrogating sources such as improving metadata, transcribing difficult scripts, and providing multilingual translation. But it can’t replicate the nuanced decision-making of a skilled curator or subject specialist. The challenge is to integrate AI where it adds value, while keeping intellectual framing and interpretation firmly human-led. We also have a responsibility to ensure AI doesn’t undermine the user’s ability to think critically and engage deeply. We mustn’t outsource critical understanding to AI, but we can use it to enhance the tools that support that engagement.

ATG: Finally, what keeps you personally inspired in this work?

MF: What inspires me is seeing the spark when someone discovers a story, a voice, or a piece of history they’ve never encountered before and knowing we’ve helped make that possible. That might be a student using a primary source for the first time, or a seasoned researcher who’s come across something genuinely new.

I’m also deeply proud of the role we play in preserving millions of digitised copies of unique and irreplaceable sources. We are living in a time of extraordinary change and uncertainty, and an understanding of history can help us navigate it more wisely. As Rachel Carson wrote, “To understand the promise of the future, it is necessary to remember the past.”