Archive

:You may be looking for the Star Trek: TOS zine Archives or The Dresden Files archive called The Archive or the fan club Star Trek Archives.
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. For a 2005 peek into this practice, see To Save or Not To Save (Fanfic); archive link page 1; archive link page 2; archive link page 3 by bethbethbeth.
Fans have also been active in archiving fanworks in general, such as other fans' websites, Tumblr pages, screenshots, and more. See: Archive your fandom stuff - dispatches from the ironsands
==Archiving, Permanence, and Loss==
Archives are generally intended to be at least semi-permanent, but time, money, and interest can affect their lifespans. Archives may fall victim to lack of funds, changing interests both on the part of contributors and maintainers, quick-moving technology, and fannish culture and expectations. Sometimes these archives shut down, with or without warning. Sometimes they are passed on to another archivist. Many older archives continue on but do not accept new submissions.
One option for preserving online archives is the OTW's Open Doors project. The OTW also assists fans in finding archives to preserve hard copy/print zines, fannish flyers, paper memorabilia, con programs, and other physical materials through the Fan Culture Preservation Project.
Some options for preserving print/hard copy materials and other fannish ephemera are the Texas A&M Cushing Library Fanzine Collection and the University of Iowa Fanzine Archives.
===Archiving, Permanence, and Loss: Fan Comments===
From a fan discussion in 2023: 
==Who Does the Archiving?==
* an archivist or team of archivists who upload their own fanworks and/or the fanworks of others, the latter with specific permission (examples: Me and Thee Archive, Hexwood)
* automatically handled by a list server under the assumption that anyone posting to the list knows in advance that their posted work will be logged for future access (examples: Gossamer, Trekiverse)
* fans themselves, using archives that allow them to archive their own fanworks (examples: Archive of Our Own, FanFiction.Net, The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive, 852 Prospect, Blackraptor, Wattpad)
==Content Policies==
Archive policies regarding what they will and will not accept varies widely.
See List of Content Banned by Archives.
==Early Archiving==
The earliest fanfiction archives were created by hand, with archivists collecting submissions via email and uploading, coding and creating appropriate links to relevant internet pages both inside and outside of the archives.
Although this can be a time- and labor-intensive process, some archives continue to work on this model.
By 1994, the newsgroups alt.startrek.creative and alt.startrek.creative.erotica began offering FTP archives (erotica offered slash); alt.comics.fan-fiction did the same in 1995 with Hawk's archive saving all fanfic posted to the comics fanfiction Usenet group.
Gossamer, and X-Files site also began in 1995. A list of active X-Files archives from 1995 can be seen here. Most were ftp sites with a few web enabled sites.WebCite for the X-Files 1995 archives. The Highlander mailing list HLFIC-L also had an FTP archive by 1996. Other mailing list archives in 1996: - jadfe (Forever Knight slash), dsx (Due South slash), hlx (Highlander slash), dief (Due South), and fkfic-l (Forever Knight). The Due South fanfic archive moved twice in 1996 from the University of Maryland to a server in Australia and then on to the Hexwood Due South archive.
When Hawk decided to stop archiving alt.comics.fanfiction in 1996, Kielle stepped in with the Comic Fan-Fiction Author's Network, which was intended to be a hubsite tying the various comics fanfiction archives and mailing lists together. Amid the many smaller archives were the "Big Three" - Shifting Sands, Lori's X-Men Archive and Fonts of Wisdom which between them hosted a significant proportion of comicfic posted in the 1990s. 
A fan remembers a different time: 
Another comment about early archives: 
Early archiving was often a bit of a free-for-all. Authors often put disclaimers on their fiction saying it was okay for others to archive their work, but that they wanted to know where the stories ended up. Other authors didn't require the stipulation of notification. It wasn't uncommon to see comments by authors saying they had no idea where all their fiction was posted.
Archive sites had a variety of levels of permission. Some had none at all: one example of the latter is this disclaimer: "Due to the number of closed sites and absent authors these days, no attempt was made to get permission to archive. If any author finds a fic here that they don't want to have included on the site, email me and we'll discuss it." A fan in 1997 stated in her fiction header: "I'm happy for the story to be circulated uncommercially, intact and with my name still attached." Joann Humby for Tears of Betrayal and Rebirth
===A 1998 Peek Into Archiving Etiquette, Attempts at Organization, and Navigating Permission in the Early Days of the Internet===
In 1998, JenRose, an archivist at Idealists Haven, attempted to tame the X-Files wild west a bit with a post to alt.tv.x-files.creative. Comments below are from ARCHIVISTS AND AUTHORS!; archive link with the comments expanded.
The intro:
A fan, Loch Ness, addressed some fans' concerns regarding this post: 
JenRose added some clarification:
A grateful fan, Pyrephox, points out: 
Another fan, Circe, adds: 
==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. Some of the most common automated archive software packages are the Automated Archive and eFiction. 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 criteria. The eFiction software also lets readers filter stories through various criteria, and has many other appealing features, such as the ability to upload stories in chapters.
==A Snapshot: Archiving in 2009==
The biggest archive in 2009 was FanFiction.net. It had over a million registered users. Some fandoms set up efiction archives and hung out on the attached forums, and some forums set up multifandom archives to house the works of their members.
Archive of Our Own had been created the year before, and was just getting started.
Amongst what was then LiveJournal-based fandom (including fans who have moved to LiveJournal clones or forks such as InsaneJournal or Dreamwidth), archives have steadily declined in popularity since the late 90s. Some LiveJournal-based fans maintained personal archives on their own webpages and post announcements of their stories to LiveJournal mailing lists and other fan networks. Others used LiveJournal as their primary archiving site, hosting their fic as LiveJournal entries (rather than hosting them on an archive).
Posting fic to LiveJournal had disadvantages, principally that LiveJournal is not automatically searchable so stories must be manually indexed using newsletters, themed masterlists, and noticeboards; also, many stories are too long for a single LiveJournal post and had to be posted in parts or chapters. But authors kept control of their stories, so they could be easily edited or deleted, presented in an individual style, or locked to select audiences. And, critically, LiveJournal's comments system made it simple for readers to leave feedback, and for authors and readers to interact socially.
This scattering of fanac across multiple archives, social media sites, and message boards can made it hard for readers and writers to find each other. It resulted in a lot of fannish infrastructure devoted to collecting and archiving links to fanworks, rather than the fanworks themselves. On LiveJournal and similar sites, there were numerous noticeboard and newsletter communities, and, especially in HP, reccers like Painless J, who compiled themed lists of works. Social bookmarking sites like delicious, Gennio, and Stumbleupon were widely used to collect everything from personal recs, to all fanworks in a fandom/ship/kink/genre.
==Archive Of Our Own==
Archive Of Our Own is a project of the Organization for Transformative Works (as is the Fanlore wiki). It is a pan-fandom, multilingual fanfic archive, which features an innovative tagging system, the ability to bookmark stories, and enables challenge moderators to host and collect challenge stories in special collections. As of the mid-2010s, it became the biggest fanwork archive, surpassing FanFiction.Net.
Brainstorming for the Archive Of Our Own began in May 2007, and coding began early in 2008. By September 2010, the archive contained over 100,000 works in over five thousand fandoms. The archive reached three million fanworks as of 28 April 2017.
Archive of Our Own has also become a dominant archive regarding fannish cultural expectations and demands regarding tagging, warnings, format, feedback and kudos, and visibility.
==Meta/Further Reading: Archives==
* How Other People Wreck Up Your Favorite FanFiction Archive by Randi DuMois (2003)
* 'Elite' archives? (2004)
* To Save or Not To Save (Fanfic); archive link page 1; archive link page 2; archive link page 3 by bethbethbeth (August 2005)
* by fanthropology (May 23, 2007)
* Fandom 1994-2000-ish/Part Two - 2012
* If you don’t support AO3′s policies, then don’t post your fic there.; archive link (January 2019)
* This is probably a very silly question but how do you know which fan works are 'worth' saving... choose-your-muse asked at prismatic-bell.tumblr (March 16, 2022)
==Meta/Further Reading: Archiving Archives==
* What's With IOHO?, a fan discussion about archiving, permissions, and fans as both providers and consumers of fanfic (1999)
* Ephemeria and fandom; archive link by aelfgifu (2005)
* by profshallowness (2005)
* Silence in the library: Archives and the preservation of fannish history by Versaphile in Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 6 (2011).
* (2008)
* (March 3, 2016)
==References==
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