Open Doors
Mission
The Open Doors project of the Organization for Transformative Works is dedicated to preserving fanworks for the future.
Currently chaired by Francesca Coppa, the project provides a point of contact with archivists and others who seek preservation for fanworks they made or are otherwise responsible for.
This might mean one of any number of things, e.g.
- Housing collections of extant stories in the Archive of Our Own once it is out of limited beta;
- Hosting fanworks that are not easily housed in the AOOO;
- Arranging, assisting, or brokering the donation and/or digitization of zines, VHS vids, and other artifacts to major university research collections.
Once the AOOO is fully up and running, Open Doors will help maintainers of typical fanfic archives preserve or backup their collections by transferring the contents of their archive into the Archive of Our Own. The OTW plans to collect these stories under the name of the archive from which they came, as well as to set up automatic redirecting from the original URLs if desired and whenever possible. These collections would be listed on the Open Doors project page and linked to the archive/collection/zine's wiki page here on Fanlore.
Fannish projects that cannot be integrated into the Archive at this time may also be preserved as special collections, resources permitting. (A current example is Missed the Saturday Dance by Zoetrope, which, because of its multimedia nature, cannot at this time be hosted by the AOOO and so is hosted as its own project. )
Open Doors is currently in discussion with several major university libraries vis a vis a zine preservation project: a major university research collection of fannish zines.
Anyone who knows of fanworks that are at risk (e.g. large collections of zines being thrown out, archives in danger of failing/crashing/abandonment, fans gafiating and abandoning their fanworks ) should contact the Open Doors Committee.
