Archive
If you are looking for the Star Trek fanzine, see Archives (fanzine).
| Synonyms: | |
| See also: | Zine, Archivist |
| Click here for articles related to this term on Fanlore. | |
| STUB | This article is a stub. Please help us out by expanding or adding to it. |
An online collection of fanworks, usually fanfic, providing a centralized place for people to post and look for stories. The term generally means a multi-author collection, most likely open to anyone to submit stories.
Most archives are intended to be at least semi-permanent, and archives often change hands rather than shut down when the archivist retires.
The term can be used as a verb as well, to describe putting a story into an archive ("archive a story") as opposed to "posting a story" to a mailing list, LJ, message board or Usenet).
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Early archiving
The earliest archives were done by hand, with an archivist who collected submissions via email and uploaded them herself, coding them into html and adding appropriate links to the archive's navigation pages.
Some archives continue to work on this model.
Modern archiving
Modern archives are more likely to use some form of automated archiving software, allowing authors to upload their own stories. These archives often feature convenient functionality that hand-coded archives do not have. On archives that use the Automated Archive software, a reader can input a search for very specific types of stories. On the Smallville Slash Archive, for instance, a fan might feel like reading an R-rated, angsty futurefic First Time for the Clark/Lex pairing, and easily be able to find every story in the archive that fits all those those criteria. The eFiction software also lets readers filter stories through various criteria. It also has many features that make it appealing to authors, such as the ability to upload stories in chapters.
Archiving in 2009
Archive posting is very popular. The biggest archive, fanfiction.net, has over a million registered users. Some fandoms set up lots of efiction archives and hang out on the attached forums, and in flip: some forums set up multifandom archives to house the works of their members.
Amongst what is now LiveJournal-based fandom, archives have steadily declined in popularity. Some LJ-based fans maintain personal archives on their own webpages and post anouncements of their stories to LJ, mailing lists, and other fan networks. Others use LJ as their primary archiving site, hosting their fic as LJ entries (rather than hosting them on an archive).
Posting fic to LJ has disadvantages, principally that LJ is not automatically searchable so stories must be manually indexed using newsletters, themed masterlists, and noticeboards. But authors keep control of their stories, so they can be easily edited or deleted, presented in an individual style, or locked to select audiences. And, critically, LJ's comments system makes it simple for readers to leave feedback, and for authors and readers to interact socially.
(Some LJ-based fans are now actually InsaneJournal-based (LJ clone), or Dreamwidth-based (LJ fork).)
This scattering of fanac across multiple archives, social media sites, and message boards can make it hard for readers and writers to find each other. It's resulted in a lot of fannish infrastructure devoted to collecting and archiving links to fanworks, rather than the fanworks themselves. On LJ, there are numerous noticeboard and newsletter communities, and, especially in HP, reccers like Painless J, who compile themed lists of works. Social bookmarking sites like delicious, Gennio, and Stumbleupon are widely used to collect everything from personal recs, to all fanworks in a fandom/ship/kink/genre.
Archive Of Our Own
The Organization for Transformative Works (also sponsor of this wiki) is developing a cross-fandom multilingual fic archive - Archive Of Our Own
