Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2023: Week 25

An archive is 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, occasionally moderated for content or quality. Most fanfic archives focus on a specific fandom, or a genre or pairing within that fandom, although some are open to all fandoms, such as the Archive Of Our Own or animemusicvideos.org.

The term can be used as a verb as well, to describe putting one's own fanwork into an archive ("archive a story") as opposed to "posting a story" to a mailing list, LJ, message board or Usenet.

Archiving can also mean preserving and saving print/hard copy fannish materials, including costumes, vids, convention program books, zines, con badges, and more.

Another form of archiving is when fans save fanworks to their hard drive, personal devices, and print out physical copies of fic to read later or share.

Fans have also been active in archiving fanworks in general, such as other fans' websites, Tumblr pages, screenshots, and more.