Summer Fellowship 2020 Highlight: Sourcery

As a historian, Dr. Tom Scheinfeldt was no stranger to the challenge of gaining access to remote, non-digitized documents. In the past, he had brought to market software that aimed to solve other problems researchers had–so why not try to solve this one, too? Tom brought his idea of a remote document delivery tool to a team of developers, designers, archivists, and researchers at UConn’s Greenhouse Studios–and Sourcery was born. Sourcery is an open-source, community-based mobile application that expands access to non-digitized archival documents in this digital world. The researcher will make a document request from his or her mobile device by entering the document’s citation information, Sourcery will locate the document in the correct archive, and the archivist will have a simple platform to scan and share the document with the researcher quickly and efficiently. The Sourcery Team is excited to launch a custom enterprise version of Sourcery at the end of this summer to help researchers during a time when social distancing measures limit in-person access to collections and the ability to travel.