Archive - Fanlore

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).

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 the LJ era

Archives have declined somewhat in popularity since the rise of Livejournal-based fandom, with more and more fans posting stories in the text of an LJ entry rather than hosting them on an archive.

Posting fic to LJ has certain disadvantages, but it does mean that authors retain a much greater amount of control over their stories, making it an attractive option to many. Another benefit of posting stories to LJ is the comments feature, which makes it simple for readers to leave feedback.

If most fans in a fandom post to LJ rather than archives, it can make it harder for them to find an audience-- and for the audience to find them. This has resulted in the creation of a lot of fannish infrastructure devoted to collecting and archiving links to fanworks, rather than the fanworks themselves. On LJ, this has led to the creation of many noticeboard and newsletter communities. Many newsletter comms use the LJ Memories function or tag-based social bookmarking sites like delicious to sort all the links collected by newsletter editors. Fans can also use the LJ Memories or sites like delicious to collect everything from their own personal recs, to all fanworks in a fandom.

However, many archives are still active and widely-used.