 Imagine you're a historian living in Connecticut and you're writing a book on Winston Churchill. As luck would have it, you need to see a letter written by Churchill that's only available at the London Metropolitan Archive. And like most archival documents, it hasn't been digitized, and you can't get it online. Your main options now are to wait days or possibly weeks for a scan from the archive, jump on a plane to see it in person, postpone your research, or shift gears and pursue other lines of inquiry. As a researcher, you're often working with document request websites that look like these. It would be great if the scan request process could be simplified. Moreover, the need for convenient remote access without need to travel is even greater during the current pandemic. Many archives are closed to in-person researchers, and universities have instituted strict travel restrictions that make it even more difficult to visit collections in person. Or on the flip side, imagine you're working in an archive. While you're eager to share your collections with researchers, you're constantly trying to keep up with an email box that's chock-full of document scan requests. If you're lucky, you have a dedicated scan request system to help you manage, but it's still often difficult to keep up with the sheer volume of requests. Even if you manage to keep track of all the requests coming in, some of your patrons may be turned away by systems that are difficult to navigate, require signing up for yet another account, or have unclear pricing. Right now, this is all the norm, and no one's really questioned why it has to be so difficult. This is why we have developed Sorcery. Sorcery is a platform that gives researchers convenient access to the documents they need, cheaper, faster, and with less hassle. Now add COVID into the mix. Travel is grounded, buildings are closed, and access to sources has never been more difficult. Archival professionals all over the world have had to work in creative ways to find ways to share their resources with researchers needing access. Sorcery also gives the ability to serve more patrons using a helpful and simple platform. Sorcery is designed to work in two different ways. First, the institutional researcher model. With Sorcery access through any device, a researcher seeking a document can simply type in the information for the document they need. Other researchers with a Sorcery account, who are located near the archive where the document sits, can claim the job, call the document from the archives, take scans of it from within the Sorcery app, and send the scans back to the researcher who made the request. For the institutional model, archives would have their own dedicated account, and Sorcery would become the archive's main in-house system for handling document requests. Under this model, the researcher makes a request from their laptop or mobile device. Sorcery locates the document in the correct archive, and the archivist has a simple platform that allows them to scan and share the document with the researcher. Any fees the archive wishes to charge are seamlessly collected by Sorcery on the archive's behalf, and the archive no longer needs to handle credit card payments or other methods of charging for requests. Without Sorcery, researchers have to follow each archive's unique instructions for requests and create a profile for each institution, or figure out how to contact the archive directly and request a scan. This also means usernames and passwords to remember for every single institution. With Sorcery, researchers are able to request documents across multiple institutions using the same platform and a single login. Sorcery doesn't just do the heavy lifting of untangling the request process for the researcher, it also aims to help the archive. With Sorcery's streamlined institutional dashboard, requests are neatly organized in a queue. Sorcery also utilizes Stripe, a widely trusted and secure payment system, to handle small dollar transactions that would otherwise take up valuable time and resources. While large, well-funded institutions may wish to provide scans free of charge, many small and medium-sized archives would like to generate revenue from document scan requests, but currently lack an efficient means of doing so. Sorcery launched in beta in December 2019, serving archives in Boston, New York, and Stores, Connecticut. In January of this year, we had the first successful request passed to the platform, and almost 400 users have signed up since launch. The reception from academic researchers, our main user base, has been overwhelmingly positive. Sorcery's early success, however, was cut short by the pandemic. When archives all around the world remain closed in the spring, we quickly began developing the institutional version of Sorcery for use by archives and collecting institutions. The institutional version is on track to be completed by the end of January. In early 2021, we plan to begin rolling out the institutional version on a free trial basis and a select number of archives. Operating under both the institutional model and the individual researcher model, Sorcery seeks to break down existing barriers between researchers and non-digitized documents in a way that benefits multiple stakeholders in the archival research community. Sorcery is open source and not for profit. Ultimately, we hope that Sorcery will become a core piece of archives infrastructure. A key part of our approach is to build Sorcery in collaboration with the researchers and institutions who use it. In particular, we have worked closely with archives and libraries as we develop the institutional version of Sorcery. This fall, in partnership with North Eastern University Library, we hosted a series of virtual workshops over boat access to archives that was attended by archivists and administrators from a range of collecting institutions and potential users. Both the workshops and the ongoing development of Sorcery have surfaced a number of difficult questions surrounding issues of access, copyright, archivist labor, and the ways in which research has changed dramatically since the advent of the smartphone. In developing Sorcery, we want to help solve some of these long-standing problems in a way that benefits the larger community of researchers. We want Sorcery to become a useful tool, but we also want to create new channels for access to archives and special collections and simplify request options for researchers, challenge the conventional financial model of archives and special collections, and create new means for funding. Help facilitate and in some ways formalize transactions between archives, researchers, and others which are already happening off the books. Make use of quicker and cheaper technologies to fulfill information needs that are different from traditional archival practices and facilitate a more accessible, equitable, and sustainable archival research landscape. Almost all of these issues predate the COVID-19 crisis, which in addition to being a public health crisis has also become a budget crisis and a crisis in access to sources for research. Many different fields will be permanently changed by the pandemic. Archival research likely will be as well. However, the pandemic also gives us an opportunity to think about how we can change the research landscape for the better. The Sorcery team includes researchers with extensive experience in both developing software and conducting archival research. We are a diverse team of scholars, developers, designers, librarians, and archivists. The very people Sorcery is designed to help. Collectively, we understand the issues researchers and archivists face because we've experienced them firsthand. Tom Sheinfeld is a historian who previously developed Omeca and Zotero, two popular academic software platforms, each with tens of thousands of users across the globe. Lead developer Brian Daly has nearly two decades experience in web and app development. Brooke Gimmel is an experienced web and user interface designer who also previously worked in the archives. Greg Colotti of UConn Library has long been at the forefront of digital collections management. Sarah Sykes, former digital projects editor for the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, has extensive experience in museums and libraries. Wes Hamrick works in digital humanities and has extensive experience conducting archival research on 18th century British and Irish literature. Garrett McComas has experience facilitating digital humanities works and working with libraries to create sustainable projects. Our institutional partners at Northeastern University Library include Dan Cohen, who also led the development of Omeca and Zotero. Many thanks for listening. We are more than happy to answer any follow-up questions you might have.