Posts by Amanda Breeden

Sourcery spent this past weekend in Philadelphia at the Organization of American Historians annual conference and answered many questions about getting started as a Sourcerer. So, we created this short guide to help recent conference attendees and new Sourcerers get started!   Creating an account   The first step to becoming a Sourcerer is, of course,…

Good news: You don’t have to be in the United States to use Sourcery! From anywhere in the world you can place a request for scans of archival materials that are located in over 40 active locations across the U.S.! Now you can easily request scans of materials held by hundreds of different repositories –…

Ready to fill Sourcery requests and wondering about the best way to create the scans using your mobile device? Luckily, there are many different options to choose from, including the native scanning option on your device. Use this guide to help you decide which scanner is best for you!   ✳️ Please note that inclusion in…

Completing your first Sourcery job might seem daunting at first. Use this guide to help you break down the steps and make the process as easy and painless as possible!   ➡️ You can view each step with more details through the Sourcerer Handbook and view technical steps through our tutorials, which should be available later…

Spring has (finally!) sprung, and with it we at Sourcery are setting our sights on institutional accounts! We spent the weekend at the New England Archivists’ Spring 2026 conference in Portland, Maine discussing how institutions fulfill scan requests for distant patrons. These conversations will help us to start developing and planning for institutional beta testing.…

Spring is for research planning! Now is the best time to explore archival collections so you can plan the most effective research trip, or to collect the archival sources you’ll need for some focused writing time over the summer. Get a jump on your summer plans with a FREE Sourcery request in your arsenal of…

The Sourcery Team is pleased to announce 4 major updates to Sourcery to kickoff 2026!   We’ll chat about each change more in-depth in this blog post, but here are the main beats:  Let’s look at each of these changes in more detail.   💸 New Pricing  Going forward, Sourcery requests will charge…  Researchers pay the retrieval…

Getting scans through Sourcery is super easy! Once you determine what you want scanned and where it is, the process of creating a request is simple. Let’s take a look at what you’ll need to know. Where the materials are: accessing the right repository and reading room You’ll want to make sure that the materials…

Sourcery integrates easily into your research workflow, no matter how you collect and review digital scans of archival materials. Sourcery is simply a new way to acquire scans of archival materials. For example, you may already download digital copies of archival materials directly from databases or websites. Perhaps archives have sent you scans over email for…

You might have seen it mentioned throughout the website and other Sourcery channels that we offer “reference quality” scans and not “digitization quality” scans. But what does that mean, in practice?  Digitizing materials is a long process that can get costly, time consuming, and require large amounts of staff effort. Digitization projects generally require specialized…