Executive Director of Publishing, AM

By Leah Hinds  (Executive Director, Charleston Hub) 

Against the Grain V38#4

ATG:  You’ve worked for AM for over 12 years now and became Executive Director of Publishing in January of 2025.  Can you tell us about your career progression and how you arrived at this role?

LH:  I joined AM as Publisher in 2014, a point in time when AM’s publishing team and programme was expanding significantly.  Initially, I oversaw a team of editors as well as commissioning and developing new digital resources myself, directly building partnerships with libraries and archives.  Over the years, as my experience of AM and the wider academic library landscape has deepened, my role has stepped outside of developing individual resources into broader oversight of the overall product strategy at AM.  My responsibility is to look to the future to ensure both our digital resources and technology are developing in the way that our customers and end users need to support their mission.  I have taken over responsibility for the full production cycle of AM resources as well as contributing to wider commercial planning as part of AM’s executive team.  

ATG:  What drew you towards academic publishing?  

LH:  I have always been drawn to academic publishing because of the opportunity to directly shape and build content — academic publishing is quite singular because of the close relationship and symbiosis between students, academics, researchers, libraries, and publishers.  This makes it especially fulfilling!  I’m just as at home considering wider library strategies, funding priorities and commercial licensing plans for higher education as I am discussing emerging research themes, new subject areas, and evolving technologies — an inherent variety which does not always feature in other types of publishing. 

ATG:  As Executive Director of Publishing, you’ve had a front-row seat to the rapid evolution of technology in scholarly publishing.  What developments do you think will have the greatest long-term impact on libraries over the next five years?

LH:  Academic publishing has been characterized by huge amounts of technological transformation for the last 20 years.  In my own career alone I’ve had the opportunity to work on print monographs, print textbooks with accompanying CD-ROMs, to vast print and online encyclopedias through to digital resources powered by complex and varied technologies.  Academic publishing has undergone this change in step with libraries, and it’s clear we are approaching an even more significant point of change. 

A huge shift must surely be the move for libraries providing access to information to help users navigate and analyze information at scale.  Evolving AI technologies are a key part of that picture, but I think it goes beyond generative AI to encompass the impact of more linked data and richer metadata, which will open up library collections to be used in different ways.  This is a significant impact for libraries and an exciting one, as researchers will want to ask increasingly complex questions across large collections and receive customized, contextualized responses rather than generic search results. 

Libraries will surely play an even more vital role in future in stewardship of content, provenance, and scholarly integrity.  Perhaps the biggest shift will be that trust will become the most valuable feature in this new complex and blended content environment.  There is some incredible work underway at libraries, influencing their wider institutions, focusing on information literacy, governance, and transparency around AI, and this work seems so important for libraries to succeed in this new era. 

So overall if I had to identify three developments with the greatest long-term impact for libraries it would be AI-powered discovery, richer metadata and interoperability, and a renewed focus on trust. 

ATG:  Artificial intelligence is changing how researchers discover, analyze, and interact with information.  Where do you see AI creating the most meaningful opportunities for libraries, and where do you think caution is warranted?

LH:  The chance for researchers to use AI-led technologies to make discovery a more natural and intuitive process, using semantic searching entity extraction, translation, pattern recognition across a large data corpus is hugely exciting.  For libraries, using technology to allow users to fully and seamlessly explore their holdings is an immensely significant opportunity.  Similarly, the ability for libraries to support teaching and research through helping users approach unfamiliar material more readily and confidently, breaking down vast amounts of material through this kind of natural interaction is another significant opportunity, and one which clearly could have a great benefit for libraries, publishers, learners and instructors. 

However, particularly when thinking about primary sources, the need to protect copyright, to foreground provenance and not flatten historical complexity (or the original source) is vitally important.  As a publisher, we are focused on our role as promoting critical thinking and engagement.  This is clearly an important consideration for libraries, too, but this protection needs to be actively built and planned at a time of significant pace and proliferation of AI tools which absorb and aggregate content. 

One of the aspects which I think is vital to the flourishing of academic publishing and higher education information provision is the reciprocal relationship between libraries, the academy, and publishers.  This should continue to ensure that publishers and libraries work together to build sustainable and responsible AI-powered content which is responsive to researchers needs and equips students with the critical thinking skills and analytical powers they need to prosper beyond higher education. 

ATG:  Primary source collections have traditionally been associated with historians and archivists, but they’re increasingly being used across many disciplines.  What trends are you seeing in the interdisciplinary use of primary source content?

LH:  We have been hearing about an increased focus on primary sources from disciplines outside of the humanities for years now, especially in science and politics, sociology, environmental history, business, and gender studies.  More recently we have witnessed a strong focus on science and empiricism outside of the arts and humanities, yet researchers are in parallel increasingly focused on questions about authority, voice, representation, and power as well as understanding migration, identity, and social trends.  Primary sources are wonderful for providing these perspectives but also for helping to prompt the kind of critical thinking and experiential engagement I’ve already referred to.  Now more than ever, we believe there is a vital role for primary sources in bringing authenticity and connection for users. 

We’ve witnessed some innovative teaching happening at institutions globally which prompts interdisciplinary study for undergraduates, blending digital humanities approaches to data analysis with rich, contextual insights from historical material.  Our publishing programme always looks to foreground sources with interdisciplinary potential reaching out beyond history, and we’ve learnt of some great examples of interdisciplinary projects enabled through engagement with AM resources, such as the charting of climate change through missionary records. 

ATG:  Digital publishing has made it possible to connect collections, metadata, and research in ways that weren’t feasible a decade ago.  What innovations are you most excited about in helping researchers make unexpected interdisciplinary connections?

LH:  It is a truly exciting time for making connections across resources and collections.  Metadata is becoming richer than ever before as we blend our long-established in-house expertise with evolving technologies and improvements in OCR and HTR transcriptions, pilot new approaches to named entity and subject tagging and in time transforming full text search for collections.  These innovations for AM preserve context whilst enabling exploration and will help researchers move from a single item to a wider network of knowledge. 

For non-specialists in particular this makes the material much easier to navigate and find entry points, but the potential is even clearer for specialists working on interdisciplinary projects, which they are suddenly able to discover relevant source material in unexpected places.  We are continually investing in our technology platform and believe there will be significant future potential for users to discover (or even rediscover) overlooked source material through this transformation, as well as drawing new semantic connections between collections which might have been separate due to format, geography, or chronology for example, creating an even richer, more extensive learning and research experience. 

ATG:  As AI tools become more sophisticated, what role do you see primary sources playing in ensuring trustworthy scholarship and responsible AI-assisted research?

LH:  Whilst there are so many future opportunities created by AI which should be embraced, primary sources have a role in future in offering an alternative, and possibly even a corrective viewpoint to a proliferation of synthetic secondary content amassing.  Primary sources in their purest form offer evidence from the past and can provide the information needed to test, challenge, and certainly contextualize data being generated by AI for research purposes.  We’ve also talked about how vital provenance and citation is and how this will increase — more than ever researchers will want to know where information emerged from, how it has been interpreted, and what else might be needed to draw a fuller understanding. 

For AM our mission is to provide primary source resources which offer transparent and critically framed contextualization — we feature authentic and often unique historical archives, which provoke debate and prompt deeper thinking, and which are ethically sourced and licensed.  

ATG:  Libraries are balancing investments in emerging technologies while continuing to support traditional collections and services.  How can they strike the right balance between innovation and stewardship?

LH:  I believe that AM shares many of the same considerations as libraries when considering how best to invest in emerging technology, whilst also acting as custodians of historical archives.  AM considers that we have a duty to promote and foster engagement with digital technologies — similarly libraries will want to focus on broadening education and access to AI tools both in terms of infrastructure and discovery layers but also in their student success provision.  It is integral to equip students with critical thinking skills and tools and, like all other organizations, librarians themselves will need to invest in confidence building and experience to both lead this user engagement but also to fully understand the potential and limitations of AI in their library context.  This is vital both for engagement with the library community but also for active and positive engagement with publishers and the evolving ways in which users can interact with content. 

Libraries can balance innovation and stewardship by firstly not seeing these as mutually exclusive — using technology to preserve and widen access to collections responsibilities.  We are learning of ways in which libraries are already wholeheartedly adopting AI technologies to key areas such as metadata and collection processing, improving accessibility and inclusive descriptions as well as shoring up long-term sustainability in doing so, freeing up more time for community-facing work and dissemination of collections to wider audiences. 

For AM, one of the key ways in which we serve to balance stewardship with innovation is to use a range of pilots carefully and transparently, to evaluate these frequently, and to ensure that humans always retain oversight.  This is especially key where AI affects discovery and presentation and is likely to be even more pressing for libraries where AI-led technologies may impact interpretation and access. 

ATG:  Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future intersection of technology, AI, and primary source publishing?  What do you hope libraries will prioritize as these changes continue to reshape scholarly research?

LH:  I hope to have conveyed that I believe there is a huge amount to be excited for the future of primary source publishing and evolving AI technologies in future!  Perhaps most of all I am optimistic about the future direction considering the successful partnerships developed between libraries and publishers because these are based on underlying intrinsic shared goals:  improving access, supporting scholarship, protecting rights, and preserving the integrity of collections. 

For many years, we have relied on complementary expertise with our partnerships with archives and libraries:  their deep knowledge of their collections and users, our ability to build and scale publishing, provide access to inaccessible material, and develop new technical capabilities.  This deep understanding and shared expertise is a unique library and publisher advantage and will be vital to the future development of trustworthy, AI-assisted research. 

The next five years won’t just be about adopting new technologies for primary sources but will be about using them responsibly to make digital collections more discoverable, connected, and useful to a wider range of researchers.  Helping researchers ask new and bigger questions of large complex collections will break new ground, but the priority should be thoughtful use, rooted in context.  It would be wonderful to see libraries continue to prioritize digital confidence, to develop pragmatic frameworks for engagement and licensing, and to focus on collaboration with publishers to ensure that technological innovation strengthens the research ecosystem for future generations.