Posts by Amanda Breeden

Greetings AHA attendees! Hear about Sourcery during your conferencing and curious about what it is and what it can do for you?   Sourcery is an archival document delivery app based out of the University of Connecticut and maintained in collaboration with Digital Scholar, the same not-for-profit behind Zotero, Omeka, and Tropy. With Sourcery, a researcher…

Let’s shine the spotlight on the key members of our Sourcery community — our Sourcerers! These archive users put their skills to work scanning materials for Researchers unable to visit the reading room in person. At the same time, they ease the burden on archivists and librarians who can help Researchers learn about collections but…

Sourcery is a great way for early career archivists and librarians to advance their archival skills and knowledge in a hands-on, structured environment. Because Sourcery is a job-based commitment, creating an account or even completing one job does not obligate you to complete more jobs. You can use this flexibility in your favor by only…

Sourcery is a great way to consult collections in archives and libraries that are too far away to visit, or are otherwise too difficult to retrieve scans from. Consider consulting the finding aids at the New York Public Library or Boston Public Library – they may have something for you!   Teaching in snowy Colorado and…

We have big plans for 2026, and not just for the app itself. We’ll be traveling around the country to introduce Sourcery to even more Researchers and archive aficionados!  Catch us at any of the below conferences for swag and chats:  8-10 January: American Historical Association; Chicago, Illinois  19-21 March: New England Archivists; Portland, Maine …

Great news: Sourcery is expanding and now covers more than 20 cities across the country! Joining Boston and New York are 23 new cities and regions, including Washington, DC, Chicago, Cleveland, and Atlanta.   The Baltimore-Washington, DC area is especially rich in archives, museums, and special collections located in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, including…

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…