I’m delighted to share this call for participation with the CNI community. CNI has been tracking the work of the Sourcery program since it’s inception, and has had several presentations on this important work during the pandemic (see our website for video recordings); hopefully we’ll have a further update at our December member meeting. I’d urge CNI member institutions to seriously consider participating in this testing program; I think this is an important part of the future of access to special collections and archives. I reproduce the call for participation below.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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The Sourcery team at the University of Connecticut is excited to announce that we are actively looking for archives, repositories, and libraries of all kinds to join us as partners during our testing phase.
Sourcery is an open-source, not-for-profit web app that unites researchers and archivists through one simple interface to request and fulfill requests for reference scans of undigitized materials. The app is accessible on any device connected to the internet, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. Sourcery can be used as both an infrastructural and a communication tool: it provides institutions with a streamlined chat interface, an organized dashboard to manage requests, an intuitive fulfillment workflow including image capture and delivery, and customized data and analytics. Sourcery offers a secure, customizable payment method for institutions looking to offset labor costs, and will integrate with applications such as Omeka, Fedora, Islandora, ArchivesSpace, and Tropy.
As a testing partner, we will help you integrate Sourcery into your existing reference-request fulfillment workflow. Through regular online check-ins with the Sourcery design and development team, both individually and with the broader Sourcery community, we will troubleshoot your reference scanning challenges and ask for your honest feedback about the app, what works and what doesn’t, and how we may improve.
To apply to be a Sourcery testing partner, please send contact information (including institution name, location, and web address) and a one-paragraph description of your reference scanning challenges to carly@uconn.edu by September 15, 2022. For more information about Sourcery, visit sourceryapp.org or follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @sourcery_app, or Facebook at @sourceryapp.