Archiving

[dani_the_girl]

I remember way back when I was young and green in the ways of web design, I wanted to re-do my website and learn from it at the same time, I started looking at web design blogs and they were all talking about the importance of creating table free designs. I had come in half way through and missed out on the establishing discussion so I was somewhat mystified and I ended up posting to my LJ saying "What is it about table-free design? Why is it good?" People linked me to a couple of posts and I got started from there and was converted pretty quickly.

I feel like I'm in a similar place when I ask the question "What is the point of fanfic archives?" If I've got a DW account with all my fic on it tagged under fic, do I need an AO3 account? What's the motivation behind building AO3. I feel like there are historical reasons for this stuff that I, so far, don't get. Anyone suggest where I can get started finding out? I am asking from a genuine desire to learn - I like the design and I've uploaded a couple of stories, but I'm not sure I have figured out the reasoning behind it yet.

Comments

[damned_colonial]

As I see it... you need to put your fic somewhere, right? Back in the day it might have been a Geocities webpage, or you might have your own web server or one you share with other fans, or whatever. There were also smaller (often fandom-specific) archive websites, usually run by an individual or a small group of volunteers. More recently it's been LJ or similar journalling sites, incl. DW.

The downside to your own webserver (or one shared with friends): you have to maintain it and probably pay for it. If you aren't pretty familiar with web technologies, it can be a big hurdle to learn how to do all the coding and stuff. If you get tired of hosting it and take it down, people will be sad because your fic has disappeared. And people have trouble finding your fic because it's on some obscure little website somewhere.

The downside to a small/fandom-specific archive run by a single person or small group: the same as all the above, except that maintenance is a somewhat bigger pain in the arse, because sometimes the archive software breaks for some reason, or you have to deal with user support for the people who are uploading fic to your site, or whatever. And this is just a hobby for you and your dog just died and augh! Hosting expenses are likely to be higher, because you will need better hosting features and more bandwidth. And, OK, the fic is a little easier to find than one-website-per-author, but unless you host an enormous archive like wraithbait (with all the maintenance overhead that entails), it's still not all that findable.

The downside to commercial hosted services like LJ or, yes, DW: any business offering some kind of hosting facility wants to make money. If at some point they decide that your fic is not making them enough money, or reducing their ability to make money, they will take it down. For example, advertiser pressure might make them decide that they no longer want sexually explicit fic. Even businesses that seem especially fan-friendly at first can succumb to these pressures after years and acquisitions and changes in business plan (since 2007 this has happened to (at least) LiveJournal, Geocities, and imeem). I don't really expect it to happen to DW, but it's something people are wary of, and not without cause. Also, unless a hosting service is highly fan-specific, the search facilities for finding fic may not be all that great.

So AO3 is better than a self-hosted website because:

* saves you the trouble of having your own web hosting
* saves you having to mark up your fic in HTML and know all that web stuff
* won't go away if you get tired of maintaining it/get hit by a bus/etc

It's better than a small archive because:

* all of the above, plus
* findability -- easier to search one big archive than many small ones
* larger pool of volunteers for maintenance/support

And it's better than a commercial hosted service because:

* not subject to commercial pressures (incl. advertiser pressures) to take down fanworks
* run by an organisation committed to defending fic against legal challenges (copyright, obscenity, etc)
* search and other features are specifically tailored to fannish needs

As princessofgeeks said, AO3 isn't trying to be the only archive, but it is a pretty good one IMHO, and for all the above reasons, I'm making it my main fic repository.

[dani_the_girl]

Thanks for this! It's interesting to get that longer term perspective - I think I've not been in fandom enough to be wary in the same way. I can defintely see the value of the searchability - I'm using it to find Spooks fic quite a bit at the minute.

[damned_colonial]

*nodnod* ... there's a direct connection from those hosted services taking stuff down to OTW setting up the archive. Strikethrough '07 was one of the direct precursors to the foundation of OTW and the rallying cry, "We need to own the servers!" But even before that (2002 says Wikipedia) fanfiction.net banned adult-rated fic... see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net#Disallowed_fanfiction_and_bans for more information. (Interesting that Wikipedia notes that many people fled to Livejournal, heh.)

[cesperanza]

You know, between ff.net and LJ with its crap searchability, we already "lost" more than half-decade at least's worth of stories in the sense that you can't bloody find the stuff. I can lay my hands on a due South story from 1998 with *no problem*--its at the Due South Archive* or the due Slash archive--but try and find one from 2005. It's buried in someone's LJ who didn't tag (I don't tag, and anyway, I don't think there were tags then) or it's on a webpage that has norobots so if you're lucky that someone's linked to it: if not, tough!

*full disclosure: I am the mod of the DSA

[gchick]

This part really can't be said enough -- as much as I love journal-based fandom for connecting with *people* (and that's a much richer part of my fandom life than it was in archive-and-mailing-list days), it's ridiculously hard to find their creations when you aren't already following the person who happened to post it on the day they posted it. Even in the best case scenario where the creator tags everything assiduously and knows all the right comms and the newsletters pick the story up, and the READER also knows the right places to look, ALL of that is still backfill for the fact that you can't easily just go somewhere and look for it.

[boogieshoes]

yes, and also, i happen to severely dislike LJ/DW/whatever as a reading format for fanfic. it's ok for shorter pieces, but to me, 10k words is 'short' - and at that point, i def. want it on some kind of website/ webpage instead of as an LJ or DW journal entry.

so, to the OP, some of your readers have different style preferences, inherited from being 'round a while, or because of disabilities or bandwidth issues or whatever. it's not that you *shouldn't* use your DW to post your fic, just be aware that some of your potential audience won't actually read it there... hence, posting on an archive could - and probably will - reach more people. AO3 has the advantages listed in one of the comments below, although it's obviously not the only choice or style out there.

coming at it as an author, i really dislike LJ being the final format for my stories. it's always struck me that the best use for LJ/DW are for comments on draft pieces, especially if you don't have a, uh, full-time beta volunteer for your stuff. this has been a quite successfull usage for me. but i prefer to see the final piece on an archive. or several.

-bs

[jesse_the_k]

Chiming in:

I came to Due South almost a decade after the canon closed, and was able to find tons of fics because of DSA and Due Slash, as well as archived recs communities.

AO3 has tag wranglers who focus on making the content available to the future. It's a non-trivial task, and I hope that the frontiers the AO3 wranglers explore will provide a foundation for future archivists & future archivists.

[littlemousling]

Just wanted to say, this is a fantastic summary.

[aigoos]

Agreed :) As someone who ran an archive by herself, it was a pain to update it and whatnot, and interests do wane, so having AO3 do something like this is a nice service to have!