Researchers: get critical documents

A surprisingly challenging step in the research process is the very first one: following the primary source leads you find while reviewing secondary literature. You may be excited to learn about a particularly intriguing letter cited by a scholar, only to discover that the letter is in an archive several states away. Perhaps you would like to double check a translation, but the original text is in a different archive in another state. Or what about seeing the photograph that is described, but not reprinted, only to learn it’s in yet another third state? How can scholars follow important leads or conduct due diligence on critical primary sources when their materials are so far flung? 

If the holding institutions aren’t able to provide scans, then researchers may ask a colleague or hire someone locally to make the scans, or even plan time and resource-intensive trips to multiple locations. But what if you don’t have the connections, or frankly the time and mental bandwidth, to travel or to track down someone to do the scans for you?  

Unfortunately, our Researcher beta testers this summer overwhelmingly indicated that they would simply just do without the materials. But why should researchers have to do without critical documents, just because they lack the ability to travel or hire someone in distant archives? Short answer: they don’t have to! 

With Sourcery, researchers have a new, affordable way to access material as a first resort and not just when all other methods of archival infrastructure break down. You can request materials wherever we have active Sourcerers – currently New York and Boston  — with many additional cities opening next week! And requesting materials through Sourcery helps you accelerate your research because you can gather your materials as you find them, rather than waiting until you have a critical mass to justify a trip or the effort to locate someone to scan them for you. Even better, you’ll have them on hand when you have time to review them.  

Next time you find yourself in a bind needing critical documents with no way to get access to them, think of Sourcery! Creating an account is easy to, just go to go.sourceryapp.org and fill out the sign-up form. Have questions? Contact us at info@sourceryapp.org!