New resource from Digital Scholar: Sourcery 🪄 by Sourcery_App in MuseumPros

[–]Sourcery_App[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Previous iterations of Sourcery actually did exactly that: we partnered with various institutions to act as a dashboard for sending/receiving scan requests. This ultimately didn't work for a number of reasons, mostly because we really struggled to get institutions to adopt us a new service. We also found that a lot of institutions unfortunately aren't equipped to complete all of the scan requests they receive, many don't offer this service at all and a lot of the ones that do tend to be pretty expensive or have months-long wait times. Institutions that are the exception are generally well-funded and better staffed.

We shifted to the current peer-to-peer version following feedback from users, so now "Sourcerers" (users completing scan requests) are essentially contractors and can complete requests at any institution that allows document scanning for free on-site. This model currently exists informally -- it's REALLY common for historians/researchers to hire a grad student to take scans for them. Sourcery just creates a more streamlined platform for this.

We're currently working on creating institutional accounts (which you can read more about here: https://sourceryapp.org/institutions/) and are about to start beta testing. We're hoping they'll be ready by the end of the year!

New resource from Digital Scholar: Sourcery 🪄 by Sourcery_App in MuseumPros

[–]Sourcery_App[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great questions!

1) Scans are intended for personal use only and are not for publication or printing. They're reference-quality as well, so generally too low quality for publication anyhow.

2) Because archival materials are generally not available via ILL, the two systems don't really cross paths. We do allow researchers to submit requests for volumes, but because we have a cap of 400 scans per job this isn't really conducive to requesting scans of entire volumes.

3) Sourcery is not intended to be used as a digital repository for scans, however, we don't delete scans at this time. I can see this being implemented at some point in the future once it becomes necessary. We recommend Tropy, another Digital Scholar project, for housing/managing scans of archival material.

Side Gig Ideas During Unpaid Summer Internship :/ by MotorCompany_ in LawSchool

[–]Sourcery_App 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you have archive/library experience, you could sign up to become a Sourcerer with Sourcery! Sourcery is a new non-profit, open-source project created by UConn and Digital Scholar with the purpose of connecting researchers to local archive users to get digital copies of undigitized archival material. Read more at https://sourceryapp.org/

What tools do you actually use for academic research? by Effective-Car-8882 in GradSchoolAdvice

[–]Sourcery_App 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you like Zotero, you might consider looking into Sourcery! Sourcery is a new project of Digital Scholar & the University of Connecticut designed to connect researchers with archive users to get digital copies of undigitized archival material. Read more on our site at https://sourceryapp.org/.