Greenhouse Studios at the University of Connecticut, in partnership with several leading libraries and archives, including Hartford Public Library, has been awarded a grant in the amount of $805,000 over two years from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant will support the continued development and outreach of Sourcery, a mobile application that streamlines the scanning of remote of archival materials, provides better connections between researchers and archivists, and offers new and more equitable pathways for archival research.
Sourcery is an open-source web application that expands access to non-digitized archival sources. The app, developed by Greenhouse Studios and supported by the non-profit Corporation for Digital Scholarship (CDS), is accessible on any device connected to the Internet. Sourcery provides archivists with a streamlined reference scanning workflow, payment processing services, and analytics on document requests. It provides researchers with a single interface for placing document requests across multiple remote repositories–a practice that has taken on new urgency during this time of limited in-person access to collections. At present, researchers can request a document from three of four partner repositories: Hartford Public Library, Northeastern University Library and the University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections. The fourth partner repository, Folger Shakespeare Library, will be available for requests upon its completion of a full renovation in 2023. During the grant period, the team at Greenhouse Studios will extend Sourcery’s reach to archives around the world.
“In Hartford Public Library’s Hartford History Center, we work to democratize the research process. We are excited to be included in the Sourcery project, as one of four institutions in the country chosen and the only public library to be participating,” said Brenda Miller, Hartford Public Library executive director of culture and communications and manager of the Hartford History Center. “We look forward to exploring how this dynamic collaboration will support our reference capability and the public we serve.”
Building on work done during the planning grant and in response both to feedback from archivists and researchers and lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, the additional funding will enable the Sourcery team to facilitate widespread institutional adoption; work with partners in libraries and archives to support the development of the application’s feature set and user experience; implement Sourcery in a way that recognizes ethical and labor issues in the archives profession; and build a robust user base among the research community. As a part of this effort, Northeastern University Library will host an in-person design charette for institutional stakeholders in the Spring of 2022, during which the team will solicit feedback and advice from colleagues in the library and archives community. In addition, the grant will enable interoperability of Sourcery with other CDS-supported projects, including Zotero, Omeka, and Tropy.
Archives interested in using Sourcery to improve their reference scanning workflows and researchers interested in trying out the app can sign up or learn more at sourceryapp.org/join-us.