Sourcery—an open source, not-for-profit, web-based application for providing remote access to archival documents—aims to improve how researchers request document scans from archivists and how archivists fulfill those requests. Existing means of providing remote access to non-digitized sources create confusion for researchers and extra work for already stretched archivists. Sourcery aims to remedy these problems, creating new and more efficient pathways of computer-mediated research and systems to facilitate and properly account for and fund the often unaccounted and under-resourced labor of archivists in providing reference scans.
At the same time, Sourcery recognizes that much archival research depends on close contact between researchers and archivists. By providing more effective online access, Sourcery ultimately aims to free up both researchers and archivists to focus on the sustained, mutual journeys of intellectual discovery at the heart of archival research.