Posts by Amanda Breeden

For most archival researchers, it’s a familiar picture. You’ve placed requests for document scans to multiple institutions, and they all require different payments and methods of communication. Did you place that request via email? Or yet another online portal? I guess you could ask your colleague to scan the documents for you, but they’re not…

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…

You’ve probably seen that Sourcery  is a “document delivery” app. But what does that mean? How does it compare with research assistance? And how does it influence how requests are submitted?  Document delivery simply refers to the act of retrieving and returning documents. To get a clearer understanding of what that means, let’s take a…

Deciding which jobs to choose can be an exciting prospect if you enjoy spending time in archives. Here are some suggestions for key items to pay attention to when selecting a job.  Interested in more resources? Our resident beta tester and Ambassador Brandon Harrington, has some pro tips for how to prepare and what to…

👂Have you heard? We’re recruiting Sourcery Ambassadors to help us expand to new cities across the United States! Are you a current or recently graduated MLIS/MS/MA/PhD student who is passionate about archival research and digital research tools? Learn more & apply via Google Form: https://forms.gle/e74hv5D4V9oKgkQt6 And now, our featured blog post: learn about Sourcerer tips…

A problem researchers often face is wanting to track down a citation or consult a distant archival collection that just may be the linchpin for their argument. But if they aren’t able to travel to the archive, what can they do? Simple scans of archival materials are hard to get from a distance if institutions…

Sourcery went on the road this past week to the Oral History Association’s Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia! While Sourcery does not currently support video or audio files to be sent or received through the app, we can still aid the oral historian in a number of ways.   Sourcery for the oral historian is not…

Need a little help getting started in Sourcery? Well, agonize no longer! In this blog post you can find tutorials on how to place a request, claim a job, and complete a job. Let’s get to it! How to place a request in Sourcery Transcript: Register your new Sourcery account. Be sure to apply “Requester…

Now that we have some context for why Sourcery requests in Boston and New York cost $65 (which, if you missed it, we talked about in a previous blog post HERE), let’s take a step back and see how Sourcery’s costs compare to travel costs from a few major cities to New York City. We’ll just…

👂Have you heard? We’re recruiting 5 Sourcery Research Ambassadors to help us test new features and expand into the Washington, DC metro area! If you’re a humanities researcher and are in need of archival materials from Washington, DC-based repositories, apply now! Read more in our previous blog post: https://sourceryapp.org/2025/09/17/join-our-team/ And now, our featured blog post:…