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

[dodificus]

I can only speak as a reader not an author but I am *loving* the archive. If it suddenly occurs to me that I ABSOLUTELY MUST read all the available fanfic written for *insert obscure movie/book/tv show here* then instead of googling and searching through coms all I have to do is go check the tags at AO3.

It exposes me to stories/fandoms/authors that I otherwise never would have come across, I check what new works have been posted/bookmarked just about every day. It's a fantastic resource, it's like the yuletide archive but all year round:)

[dani_the_girl]

Previously, I've been doing that on delicious, but I have to admit the Archive is much easier on the eye and easier to use for that sort of thing - I've mostly stuck there in my quest for Spooks fic.

[torachan]

Right now AO3 is still getting going, but I think eventually it will be better than delicious because it's made with fandom in mind. On delicious, you have non-fandom stuff mixed in, so it can make things hard to search for. Fandom names and pairings might be somewhat easy (though for fandom names you will still come across non-fanfic stuff, and for, say, Supernatural, you could find stuff tagged that which has nothing to do with the show at all), but say I want to find fic about a certain thing, well, that's pretty hard on delicious since if I click on a general BDSM tag, say, it's going to get me all sorts of non-fanfic BDSM stuff.

There's also the fact that delicious tags don't have any sort of order. So if I want to search for Stargate: Atlantis fic about John and Rodney, I'm going to be clicking tags for John/Rodney, Rodney/John, McShep, McKay/Sheppard, Sheppard/McKay, JohnSheppard/RodneyMcKay, John_Sheppard/Rodney_McKay, John.Sheppard/Rodney.McKay, etc. etc. On AO3, those are all wrangled together, so however the author tags their fics, I can just click on the Rodney McKay/John Sheppard tag and see all those other options together.

For readers, I think that's a big advantage.