The Professionals Circuit
| Name: | the Professionals Circuit, the Circuit Library, the Online Circuit Library, the Professionals Circuit Archive |
| Date(s): | 1980s - present (circuit); 1996 - present (archive) |
| Type: | Fan Fiction Archive |
| Fandom: | The Professionals |
| URL: | http://www.thecircuitarchive.com/
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| Click here for articles related to this site on Fanlore. | |
Today's Professionals Circuit Archive is much like any other archive in fandom. But it has a long and involved history.
Contents |
First, there was the Circuit
Zines were already common in Star Trek and Blake's 7 fandom, yet in the mid-'80s, when stories were first being written for The Professionals in Britain, fanfic was mostly just shared from fan to fan. The "circuit" was thus a way of trading stories around without the formality of publishing them as zines. (Pros began as a slash fandom, and the vast majority of Pros fanfic has always been slash, but the circuit had both slash and gen stories.)
Then the Circuit Library
By the late 1980s, Professionals fandom had begun to offer zines, but most of the fiction was still on the "circuit," which by now had been gathered together in the Circuit Library.[1] in the U.K. run by Sara Slinn, and the primary U.S. version run by Karen B. (Southern California Pros fandom created their own satellite circuit to take some of the stress off of Karen.)
In the early 1990s, the U.S. library had over 1,000 stories. You could order up to 10 stories at a time once a month. It cost $12 a year to join, plus mailing fees both ways. (At 10 stories a month, it would take about 10 years to read them all.) The library worked best when you worked in unison with a partner or two, so that fans could double, triple, or quadruple the amount of stories they could receive per month. Fans would photocopy the stories and bind them. These bound stories would often be lent locally to other fans in effect becoming their own mini-circuit library.
The U.S. Ciruit Library closed down in ??
The U.K. Circuit Library is still going as of 2008, distributing stories to subscribers by physical post. (still run by Sara Slinn?)
One note: the library was the formal way of interacting with the circuit -- it was not the circuit, itself.
Next came the Online Library
In 1992, Virgule-L was formed. Almost immediately, the Pros fans on the list started to pimp Pros to the Star Trek and Blake's 7 fans on the list. Alexfandra was one of the first converted, and quickly became Primary Pros Pimp of the list. She and other list members occasionally typed stories in so they could email them to each other to make pimping easier.
Alex maintained a list of these stories and coordinated typists, so that no one typed a story twice, and by early '93, it was known as Alex's electronic Pros library. (People also typed in stories when they noticed the Library copy they had was almost unreadable -- clean copies were made available to Karen Brandl to use in the circuit as she saw fit.) When a typist sent Alex a new story, Alex sent the story out to everyone on the Professionals story list. (This list, now called Proslib after many hosting changes, still exists, and is still used to distribute newly typed-up circuit stories, as well as for posting of new stories.) At this point, there wasn't an organized effort to put all of the Circuit Library online. (A side note is that many fans at that time were still wary of the Internet, and one person called Alex a "danger and a menace to fandom" for making the stories available electronically.)
In May '95, with about 140 stories, novellas, and novels typed in, Alex gave up the Online Circuit Library and Debbie Ramsey took it over. Debbie was the new broom, motivated to "make something" of the library. A month later, in June '95, Debbie mentioned on Virgule that she was planning to acquire a password-protected FTP site, so that people could download their own Pros stories instead of making Debbie mail them out.
Controversy
A firestorm erupted over placing the works of writers into cyberspace without permission. (The level of hysteria was high: "All it would take would be an English-speaking hacker to get in, recognize the characters and splash it all over the news.") There were complaints that these fen generously offered their creations to Karen Brandl's library, to be PRIVATELY circulated among Pros fans; to which other fans responded that circuit does NOT equal "Karen Brandl's library."
Others pushed back, saying that any story that couldn't be verified as having permission (something virtually impossible to do what with pseudonyms and the huge number of stories labeled as being by Anonymous) shouldn't go into any electronic storage/distribution site. The argument finally broke into two sides -- did we have the right to move other people's intellectual property to a new format? And was putting stories on the 'net, even on a protected site, taking the chance of "outing slash" in some horrible way?
In the face of this, the FTP plan was abandoned, and old Pros writers started making their wishes known about electronic copies. The authors O Yardley, HG, and several other British authors asked not to have their stories emailed, but they were okay with them being snail mailed on diskette. [2]
Back to work
Some of the typists deserve fan awards -- for example, Beth F. typed the 615 pages of Waiting to Fall (at the time, probably fandom's largest novel, and still more than twice as large as any other Pros story in the Professsionals Circuit Archive).
In February of '96, Morgan Dawn brought the Pros Online Library to Escapade for people to copy for themselves. There were roughly 200 stories, and they fit on 11 formatted IBM diskettes.
The diskettes remained a key way to distribute the Online Library for years; after signing up for the email story list, you could send Debbie either a set number of blank disks (which grew as the Online Library grew) or enough money to cover the costs of disks, and she would send you the entire library back, catching you up to the point where you'd joined the email list and started saving them yourself. (This provided a very handy way to locate stories -- each disk was numbered, and the same stories were always added to the same disks, so you could tell someone to check Disk 17 for the story they were looking for.) Later, when home-burned CDs became available, the Online Library switched to CD for distribution -- but still in "disk #" folders, to keep things consistent. A story on diskette 17 would be in folder "Disk 17" on the CD.
As of October 2008, the Pros CD is up to Disk 96. [3]
In Mar 2000, Deb R. created the Yahoo email group Proslib to distribute the stories online. As of Nov 2009, it's still active.
The Professionals Circuit Archive
Later in 1996, Meri began the Sisyphean task of getting permission from Pros authors to put their stories on the web as The Professionals Circuit Archive. Pros fandom was still somewhat suspicious of the Internet, and it was her tireless efforts to contact authors personally (often through snail mail) and persuade them of the benefits of permitting their stories to be archived online that made the archive possible. It was slow going, not just to find authors to agree, but to get the stories themselves typed up. As of December 31, 2003, there were approximately 700 stories in the archive.[4]
In 2004, the archive was turned over to Justacat. She completely redid it as an automated archive, with a search engine to make stories easier to find. Unlike most other automated archives, though, Justacat didn't open uploading to anyone else; she still uploads every story herself. This is to prevent fans, in an attempt to be helpful, from adding circuit or zine stories to the archive that their authors haven't given permission for. Stories from the circuit are still being added as well, with permission. Currently, from drabbles to novels, the archive has 1,963 fanworks archived -- not just fanfic, but also fanart and vids, making the Circuit Archive one of the most complete fandom archives on the web.
And yet, even in 2008, the electronic library (available by joining the email group, or ordering a CD of its contents) has many stories that are not (yet?) available on the online Archive.
Notes and References
- ↑ There were short-lived lending libraries in other fandoms: (Prydonians of Prynceton lending library for B7); a FK library; Camille Bacon-Smith's book mentions the lending library for K/S zines. Many cons have/had zine libraries, often including boxes of old circuit stories. Until recently, Ming Wathne tried to manage a fanfic archive, the Fanzine Archives for zines from all fandoms. None of them worked as well, or for as long, as the Pros Circuit Library.
- ↑ All three authors eventually allowed their work to be posted online, but it took years before they were comfortable enough to allow it.
- ↑ Proslib CD Index, updated October 1, 2008. Accessed October 31, 2008.
- ↑ About the Professionals Circuit Archive, accessed October 31, 2008.
