Sources & provenance

A note without a source is an orphan. You captured something insightful, it's tagged to an Idea, but six months later you can't remember whether it came from Adam Grant or a podcast transcript. Surfc prevents this by anchoring every note to a source.

What a source is

A source is any text you're reading from — a book, article, essay, lecture transcript, or document. Surfc keeps a library of your sources that you build up as you read.

Each source has:

• A title (required)
• An author (optional, but worth adding)

That's it. Surfc isn't trying to replace your bookshelf app — it's just keeping track of where your notes came from.

Adding a source

There are two ways to add a source:

While creating a note: tap the Source field and type a title. If it's not in your library yet, tap Add "[title]" to create it on the spot. This is the most natural flow — sources grow alongside your reading.

From the Sources screen: tap Sources in the bottom navigation, then tap the + button. Fill in the title and author, then save.

Linking a note to a source

During capture, tap the Source field and select or create the relevant book. Source is optional at the point of saving, but an unsourced note loses its provenance — six months later you won't know where the thought came from. It's worth the extra tap.

Page numbers

After selecting a source, you'll see an optional Page field. Enter the page number (or a range, like 112–115).

Page numbers seem like a small detail but they change how useful your index is. Compare:

"I have a note about resilience — it's somewhere in Brown."

versus

"I have a note about resilience — Daring Greatly, p. 78."

The second version means you can retrieve the original passage in under a minute.

Browsing by source

The Sources screen lists every book in your library. Tap any title to see all notes you've captured from it — effectively a view of your annotations for that book.

This is the other half of Surfc's index. The Ideas view answers "what have I read on habit?" The Sources view answers "what did I capture from Atomic Habits?" Both views draw from the same pool of notes.

Editing and removing sources

Tap a source in the library to open its detail view. You can edit the title or author from here.

To remove a source, tap it to open its detail view and select Remove. Be aware that removing a source also removes its notes from your index, and there's no undo button inside the app to bring them back.

---

Next: Idea discovery — how the AI reads your notes and suggests which Ideas they connect to.