Welcome to the AMI Montessori Archives

AMI is delighted to be able to launch a beta version of the AMI Montessori Archives on the occasion of our 2024 Annual General Meeting.

This project would not have been possible without generous grant funding and the farsighted vision of philanthropists and the Montessori family supporting AMI's work.

The archives has launched its beta testing phase with hundreds of digital objects (archival documents, photographs, articles, newspaper clipping, video and audio) highlighting aspects of the history of Maria Montessori's life and work. 

We are also thrilled to make available the first stage of the journal collection of the North American Montessori Teacher's Association. The NAMTA Board has contributed the entire collection to be housed in the AMI Montessori Archives, in order to have this valuable resource be publicly available, in perpetuity, according to best practice archival, discoverability and open access standards. 

The archives will eventually hold tens of thousands of digital objects and is a multi-year technical project. The beta release will enable users to report any technical issues and provide feedback on speed and accessibility. We also welcome your suggestions for any improvements or content to be included in the AMI Montessori Archives.

We have many exciting developments ahead including added a Montessori Vocabulary to aid in discovery and categorisation of the digital objects. We are very grateful to the work done by David Kahn and Mary Maher Boehnlein, Ph.D who have helped elucidate and define key Montessori concepts.

AMI has also received the donation of many special collections from notable Montessorians past and present. We look forward to adding these to the archives over the coming years, thus laying an ever stronger foundation for our shared Montessori work.

We, who work for a single goal, are as it were, the members of the same person. Those who come after us will attain further goals, because there were those who believed and worked before them!

^{Maria Montessori, The Discovery of the Child, p. 5}

Lynne Lawrence
Executive Director
Association Montessori Internationale