...Archives are constructed memories about the past, about history, heritage, and culture, about personal roots and familial connections, and about who we are as human beings; as such, they offer glimpses into our common humanity. Yet memory is notoriously selective—in individuals, in societies, and, yes, in archives. With memory comes forgetting. With memory comes the inevitable privileging of certain records and records creators, certain functions, activities, and groups in society, and the marginalizing or silencing of others. Memory, and forgetting, can serve a whole range of practical, cultural, political, symbolic, emotional and ethical imperatives and is central to power, identity, and privilege.
Terry Cook, “Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms” (2012)
Perhaps, however, we archivists need to be more self-conscious about the distinction, in our field, and in our work, between our many processes of archiving and our end product, the archive. Perhaps in such processes, we embed our own identity and our own collective memory and mythologies. Perhaps in defining and carrying out these processes, we have found our sense of community as like-minded professionals. The border between impartial archives, on the one hand, and researcher or societal interpretation of the archive, on the other, may well be a good deal more porous and interactive than often supposed. That ambiguity should be recognized, and embraced, as the desirable path for archives in the twenty-first century.
Terry Cook, “Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms” (2012)
I chose the Dual program because I want to work in a museum or public library in my future career. Public information and history has been a lifelong passion of mine, and I think public information institutions such as museums and public libraries have an important role to play in the responsible, ethical, and equitable stewardship of that information. The Dual program will help prepare me to work with different forms and expressions of knowledge in a variety of different settings (e.g. libraries, public archives, and provide me with the knowledge and the skill set I need to work in my chosen field.
Focus on the Fan-mily: Community Archiving and the Archive of Our Own
A five-part series on AO3 as a community archive, considering how archival theory and fandom history meet to create a ground-breaking fan archive experience like no other, and the possibilities this has for the archival profession moving forwards.
Full essay (with citations) here
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
Part V - A Future of Possibilities: Concluding Thoughts
In the decade or so since its inception, the Archive of Our Own has come to dominate the fan archive scene, impressing users with its well-developed technological features, its professional-level organization, and the many freedoms it offers. While AO3 is not the first fan site to grant creators total control over their works, it distinguishes itself by maintaining the accessibility of other users at the same time. AO3 also lays claim to an unusual distinction. Many hosting sites for fan works have also called themselves archives before but have otherwise made no claims to any archival goals other than storing and providing access to the items in their collections. On the contrary, AO3’s creators, the Organization for Transformative Work, specifically states that their mission is the preservation of and access to the history of fan works and fan cultures. It is an archival-minded purpose, and it positions AO3, the OTW’s first and most prominent creation, as an archival institution rather than another online library. Created by fans, for fans, to address fan needs and preserve fan culture and history, AO3 serves as a community archive for fan communities across the Internet. Like many orthodox community archives, it is concerned with a historically marginalized subculture and community, and it owes its existence and ongoing management to the will and impetus of community members. At the same time, AO3 pushes the boundaries of an archive’s functions, responsibilities, and execution: dealing with highly unorthodox record types, relying on the expertise of its volunteers over the expertise of an archive or heritage worker, granting creators the power to make archival decisions about their own records, and serving the active and varied needs of its community members rather than remaining focused on its records alone.
AO3 benefits from a long history in fan communities of archival and archival-adjacent activities, and a knowledge of where its predecessors did well and where they could have improved. Its developers were thus able to identify and address issues that became important to fans over the years, such as search and accessibility, the stability and security of the collections, and the importance of creator autonomy over their own works. Despite this, challenges still face AO3, largely of ideological natures. The OTW’s narrative of a unified fan community represented by a central AO3 overlooks the harsh nature of communities — that they are actively shaped and reshaped through violence and erasure, and that every assertion of identity necessitates an ‘other’ who is left out or cannot belong. While AO3 produces a rich cultural and community space for fans through its archival work, its ability to accurately preserve and make accessible the complex and extensive experiences of fan culture beyond the archive is limited. And as with many orthodox community archives, AO3’s active assertion and pursuit of legitimacy concerns some users, who recognize its strategic reasons for doing so even as they fear the loss of their autonomy and the encroaching influence of domineering mainstream institutions.
Although there are no easy answers to the challenges raised by or to AO3, and it is impossible to predict whether the AO3 model will remain strong in the decades to come, it is certain that for the time being, AO3 looks to be here to stay. Grounded in fan communities and managed by fans in accordance with community values and needs, AO3 has a versatility that enables it to serve many different purposes for its users, from teaching to connecting and community building to legal protection. And although certainly not perfect, AO3 presents a model of community archiving that raises interesting possibilities for archival professionals. In what ways can the archive, particularly the community archive, serve and contribute to community needs beyond the evidentiary value of its collections? How might archives and archivists benefit from opening the doors to community volunteers with a variety of skillsets beyond archival expertise? And what might be the potential benefits and downsides if records creators were able to retain full control over their own records in the archive?
There’s no way to know except to try it out. And as the archival profession continues to evolve and explore new theories and practices, AO3 is one community archive to watch.
Focus on the Fan-mily: Community Archiving and the Archive of Our Own
A five-part series on AO3 as a community archive, considering how archival theory and fandom history meet to create a ground-breaking fan archive experience like no other, and the possibilities this has for the archival profession moving forwards.
Full essay (with citations) here
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part V
Part IV - Challenging “Our” Archive: Questions and Concerns
With a site named “Archive of Our Own,” the immediate question that springs to mind is just who is included as a part of that “Our.” For the OTW’s part, the “Our” means fans, and the point is to be inclusive of all groups of fans, regardless of fandom or preferences. For critics, this happy narrative of an amorphous, overarching fan subculture is insufficient. Drawing on arguments made by Miranda Joseph and Jacques Derrida about identity and community, Alexis Lothian problematizes the OTW’s narrative of the legitimate subcultural fan community, arguing that all communities and archives are built on struggle and exclusion — and the narrative of “Our Own” unified fan community represented by AO3 does not match the reality of how communities construct themselves through violence and erasure. As users interact with and construct spaces within AO3 for their fandom experiences, who is left out and who is made unwelcome?
AO3’s open content policy can result in hostile environments for certain fans. On one hand, the creator’s ability to post whatever content they desire without censorship means that offensive works can and do become widely accessible, particularly if the original media already contained offensive material in the first place. A proliferation of such works creates a harmful community atmosphere for already marginalized fans. For example, if a prominent author writes a story where the sole character of colour is treated poorly, and other creators are inspired by its popularity to create similar content, that fandom environment becomes incredibly violent for fans of colour. On the other hand, if a group of fans decide that a creator is producing content that they personally dislike —for example, a queer creator writes a tragedy in which a queer character dies, prompting calls of homophobia— they can bully the creator out of the archival space by mass-reporting their works for offensive content and harassing them in the comments. Such occurrences on both ends of the spectrum are common, and a part of what actively and continually challenges shapes the fan spaces within AO3, for better or for worse.
For the material which is included, AO3’s exclusively digital nature raises questions about the nature of the cultural history and memory that it preserves. How do AO3’s records, its fan works, serve as records of cultural history and memory, particularly in a digital environment? Critics such as Alexis Lothian and Abigail De Kosnik reimagine these creative fan works not as a lasting literary record, but as performance and actions. For De Kosnik, digital archives are actively constructed spaces, and the very act of archival volunteers developing archival “repertoires” —practices handed down from person to person— is how online cultural production becomes archived. By this argument, AO3’s very existence is itself a record of fan culture. A team of volunteers, developing an archival repertoire of practices and methods from the ground up and passing on that knowledge to future hands, is an ongoing work of cultural production. But what of the actual records themselves? Lothian suggests that while the storage of fan works creates structures in fan communities, the fan networks and cultures that form around those structures are dynamic and influenced by their environments. Drawing from Francesca Coppa, who reframes fan writings as modes of performance, fan culture as the act of writing rather than the text itself, and archives as perpetuating the cultural norms and tropes which differentiate these acts of writing from others on the Internet, Lothian argues that only ephemera from these performances can ever remain, no matter how embedded in the culture the archive is. Lothian’s view is that the act of archiving a performance removes it from its lived experience and the cultural context it embodies, and reframes it as a work of art. To an extent, AO3 will never be able to capture more than traces of fan culture and memory.
And yet the unique context of fan communities calls into question the usefulness of speaking of records and archives as though they were wholly separate from these acts of memory and performances of culture. Lothian’s critique that archival models such as AO3’s cannot capture more than the fleeting ephemera of a larger cultural performance is true, provided that these performances occur outside of the archive. But what of the cultures and communities which form within and because of the archival space? Fan scholar Versaphile argues that fan fiction and fan archives are the methods by which fans learn the culture of their community. In those records, fans find inspiration and the learning to build upon what they have read, creating new and complex understandings and explorations of the material which in turn become a part of that community’s culture. Likewise, De Kosnik suggests that “feelings of community are generated by more than the everyday communications that transpire on social media sites,” and that archives provide a way for new community members to learn the community’s cultural traditions — how members interpret media and express themselves, and what kind of content they produce. If archives cannot wholly capture the experience and the act of a community’s culture, it can nevertheless facilitate, impart, and maintain a sense of home and belonging for the community’s members.
It is such cultural spaces of community, created in and by archival activities, that AO3 protects when it seeks legitimacy from mainstream institutions. Alexis Lothian observes that “the preservative politics of the AO3 requires legitimation for ‘transformative’ uses of corporate intellectual property within US law, solidifying the uncertain legal place of fanworks for the sake of their continued accessibility and their makers’ legal safety,” although they rightfully critique OTW’s language of profit and capital in pursuing these ends. It was not so long ago that fan creators plastered their content with lengthy disclaimers, fearing copyright lawyers and litigation. Notorious cases of popular authors such as Anne Rice sending Cease and Desists, taking fans to court, and having lawyers harass fans in their off-fandom lives, terrified fan communities for years. OTW argues for the legality of fan works, which it terms “transformative works,” as a fair use response to an original work, because the time when a fan could be taken to court and have their life and reputation ruined by an expensive and public copyright suit is still within the living memory of many fans. The general mainstream acceptance —arguably for commercialization purposes— of fandoms as a “cool” and “nerdy” interest is an extremely recent development. Historically, fan cultures have been subcultural out of necessity, and fan communities have been decentralized and exclusive. Any publicity or open congregation that did not fall within socially accepted mores or the copyright holder’s values could result in serious consequences for fans and even the destruction of their community.
This is not to say that criticisms of AO3’s campaign for legitimacy do not raise valid points about the historic culture that is being lost, the dangers of embracing mainstream, largely capitalist institutions, and concerns over community autonomy. Whilst the flavour of fandom adds a unique context, many community archive participants share similar concerns. Discussing community heritage archives, Flinn, Stevens and Shepherd (2009) observe that many community archives are eager to develop partnerships with mainstream institutions, and by bringing their stories, perspectives, and expertise into the mainstream narrative, achieve greater recognition for the community they represent. However, they also wish to do so under their own autonomy and independence, with full control over their own narrative and collections, which can be easily lost when the other side of the partnership is a much larger institution with greater resources. For fan communities, loss of autonomy might look like corporate sponsors dominating their spaces, from the ad promotions of the short-lived FanLib to the possibility of being forced to pay a corporation for access to particular features or sites. On this account, AO3 continues to assert itself as a noncommercial, nonprofit organization, although critics such as Lothian question the OTW’s approach when it argues that fan content, far from competing with an original creator’s work, “help[s] to promote it,” and that fan creators “tend to spend heaps of money on the original work and associated merchandise, and encourage others to buy also.” The suggestion that fan content in any way contributes to someone’s profit, and that this should be an argument for legitimacy, is uncomfortable for many fans, even as they recognize the overall strategy behind the argument.
This use of strategy, no matter how unpalatable to some community members, exemplifies AO3’s approach to archival practice, one in which the community archive is not only a space of memory and preservation, but a tool with many functions that serve its community’s needs. While the idea of archives as an active (and partisan) tool in shaping societal memory is not new, AO3 demonstrates an archival model in which the archive becomes a tool as needed for its users’ many purposes. From enabling community members to retain direct and full control over their own records; to creating a welcoming environment that can be both a home and a learning centre according to the needs of the user; to serving as an organized, centralized institution free of mainstream influence that actively defends the legal rights of its users, AO3 is less a depository of fan materials as it is a versatile resource for its community members’ needs. Indeed, the OTW states that their first goal in developing AO3’s software was to provide fans with a free, open-source software that they could use to create and host their own archives. Even as AO3 stands as a centralized archive for all fan communities, it enables and encourages those communities to create their own unique and fully functional archival spaces.
Part IV Sources:
De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016.
Flinn, Andrew, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd. "Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream." Archival Science 9, no. 1-2 (2009): 71-86.
Lothian, Alexis. “Archival Anarchies: Online Fandom, Subcultural Conservation, and the Transformative Work of Digital Ephemera.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 6 (2013): 541–56. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912459132
Organization for Transformative Works. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://www.transformativeworks.org
Versaphile. “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History.” In "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. (2011). Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.
Focus on the Fan-mily: Community Archiving and the Archive of Our Own
A five-part series on AO3 as a community archive, considering how archival theory and fandom history meet to create a ground-breaking fan archive experience like no other, and the possibilities this has for the archival profession moving forwards.
Full essay (with citations) here
Part I | Part II | Part IV | Part V
Part III - Chasing the Ephemeral: An Overview of Fan Archival Activities
To understand AO3’s insistence on enabling the creator with full power over their works, it is important to understand the fan culture and context that AO3 developed out of, as well as the complex history of fan archival activities. Since the early days of modern fan culture, with Star Trek fans in the 1960s, fan spaces have been a place of sub-culture and secrecy, with transformative works and fan fiction —the dominant form of record on AO3— being particularly revolutionary. Fan academics such as Abigail Derecho often identify fan fiction as a form of societal criticism, predominantly created by women and people from minority groups. Using fan fiction, fans from marginalized groups create content for themselves that reimagines the hierarchical and societal norms reflected in the original media and wrests control of storytelling and creativity away from mainstream capitalist studios and publishers. This content often contains themes and subjects considered counterculture or radical by mainstream society — for example, until very recently (and arguably in some corners still), this included any queer interpretations, feminist discourse, or erotica. At the same time, fans use the spaces in and around this content —the writer-reader relationship, the aggregation of stories with similar subjects, the use of particular tropes and specialized lingo— to create a community and culture that reflects their own, often marginalized, experiences. Particularly with the connectivity of the Internet, Abigail De Kosnik observes that digital fan fiction archives become “safe spaces” where fans with similar experiences can “come together, sharing ideas and experiences without fear of silencing.”
This “fear of silencing” has long plagued fan spaces and has come both from within and without communities. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, fans largely shared their content through zines and amateur press associations, relying on conventions and meet ups to come together with other community members and distribute their work. With the advent of the Internet, fan communities —known as fandoms— began to attract a new and wider scope of members. Now younger fans, international fans, and even people who had never heard of fandom before, could connect with existing communities so long as they had access to an Internet connection. A fan scholar by the pseudonym of Versaphile observes that early digital sites were particularly ephemeral in nature — posts and discussions on forums had a lifespan of days or weeks, and it wouldn’t be until the mid-1990s that sites began retaining user content. Major archives dedicated to fan fiction began emerging in the mid 1990s, usually centred around stories from a single fandom. These early archives would perhaps be more recognizable to archival professionals — users posted their content or submitted them to the web archivist, who would format, file and preserve the materials they received in order to make them available to archive users. Creators could request that their content not be archived, or that their previously archived materials be deleted, but generally, archives retained their materials until they were dissolved or deleted.
While there were technical issues with these early archives, such as poor accessibility and search functionality, one of the greatest threats to these archives was the loss of their archivists. Once an archivist lost interest in the fandom, or was no longer able to manage the archive, the entire site could disappear as maintenance ceased, domains expired and were not renewed, and reorganization destroyed years of existing structure and links. This is a common concern with community archives, particularly those of the Do It Yourself variety — as Rebecka Sheffield observes, the loss of interest from archive members or the inability to maintain the existing collection has led to the disappearance of many archival projects. With the disappearance of each archive, years of fandom discussion, content, and community were lost forever, unless individual members made a special effort to preserve certain elements on their own ends. Fans began to learn an important lesson that would continue to shape fandom for years to come — their communities, the stories they created and shared, the unique fandom cultures and relationships that they had developed, even the shared memory of their own history, was only as stable and permanent as the whim and will of the site administrators.
As fans explored different methods of communication and content sharing into the early 2000s, the role of the administrator remained a question. Mailing lists centred around a particular theme, genre, or relationship provided a decentralized and highly tailored fandom experience at the cost of accessibility. Links to content were closed to non-members, who had to apply for membership with the list’s moderators just to access a single story, and moderators had the power to delete entire lists whenever they pleased, thereby deleting all the works preserved within. The popular journaling website LiveJournal dominated fandom communities through the early 2000s, granting creators seemingly exclusive control over their own content. Creators could make their journals public or private, and rename, hide or delete them altogether. Accessibility remained an issue: content was poorly and inconsistently tagged, the search function was nigh non-existent, and users had to develop through experience a knowledge of which journals might contain content they were interested in and what terms a creator might use to describe their work. Although some users began developing general guides for creators to describe and tag their work, compliance with these guides depended on the individual creator. With the rise of the creator’s autonomy over their own work came issues of organization and management, and the ever-present question about the preservation of content.
While fans wrestled with the question of intracommunity preservation, outside forces began emerging as threats to fandom communities and creators, as litigation, censorship, and commercialization began targeting fan spaces. In the late 2000s, LiveJournal saw several waves of migration to other sites as website staff began banning users en masse and taking down content which they judged to be immoral or illegal. These takedowns, supposedly aimed at sexual crimes, could affect any content that involved sex — from age-restricted adult fan fiction journals, to sexual assault survivors’ spaces, to queer fan fiction, which was seen as inherently sexual regardless of content. Similar censorship restrictions affected other popular fan hosting sites, such as Fanfiction.net, which was in many ways a precursor to AO3. As a centralized, multi-fandom site with a relatively organized structure, Fanfiction.net provided fan creators with the ability to format and post their own stories in one place, and enabled users to find and access those stories with comparative ease using a controlled vocabulary with its descriptive elements. However, throughout the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, the website began imposing restrictions on the kind of content that fans could publish. Adult fan fiction was banned, as was any content which could potentially result in litigation from a studio, publishing company, or author. Creators issued lengthy disclaimers with each post, making it clear that they did not own the original media or characters on which their fan work was based. It was vital that no one could argue in court that they had given any impression of owning the intellectual material, as there had been high profile cases of authors suing and harassing fan writers. Works containing quotations of more than a few lines, such as a stanza of a song or a paragraph from a book, ran the constant risk of sudden deletion by administrators. Users became increasingly disgruntled with the censorship and the constant fear of deletion by site staff.
The intrusion of mainstream capitalism also began to challenge the sub-culture of secret community that many fans had become used to. As “fandom” became increasingly prominent, corporations saw fan communities as a potential resource. For media companies, fan content produced through free fan labour increases the presence and reach of the original media. Popular fan sites were also profitable places for ads, and web servers and companies benefitted from the increased traffic. In the eyes of many fans, this was nothing short of exploitation. Coming from a strongly decentralized period in fan history, fan spaces were seen as personal and counterculture — fans made the content they wanted to consume for their communities, not for their own profit, and certainly not for the profit of large corporations. The increasing presence of commercial ads on fan sites such as Fanfiction.net was insulting, and the creation of the notorious FanLib.com in 2007 was even more so. If the presence of ads on sites like Fanfiction.net —where users feared that failing to write a clear enough disclaimer could be interpreted as an intent to profit by lawyers— was controversial, then FanLib, which was designed to profit off of fan fiction and which boasted paid promotions from media companies, was intolerable. The FanLib debacle was the last straw, and outraged fans, frustrated with censorship and corporate intrusion and the loss of communities and cultures over the years, began to organize.
It was against this backdrop that the OTW formed, and it was in light of these discussions around the preservation of fan culture and history, the questions of censorship and profit, and the rights of fans, that fans created AO3 in 2008, with the site going into open beta in 2009. Their rallying point was the idea of “owning the servers,” creating a centralized space controlled by fans where their communities and creators could exist in safety and stability, creating the content that they wanted without fear of deletion, censorship, or exploitation, which by its long-term preservation would help keep alive the fan cultures and communities that produced it. With personal experience in fandom and previous fan archival projects, AO3’s creators were familiar with what fans needed or looked for in an archival space. Accessibility was a must. To that end, AO3 maintains a highly sophisticated descriptive tagging system, with volunteer “tag wranglers” interpreting and linking unique creator tags with larger related tags, preserving the creator’s descriptive intent while facilitating access to their works. Autonomy was balanced with archival preservation — creators can submit and describe their works however they feel is best, and retain rights of deletion and anonymity, while leaving the archival work of preservation, management and accessibility to site volunteers. Crucially, and sometimes controversially, AO3 permits fan content containing any subject without fear of censorship or deletion. While users may submit complaints about individual works, and creators must still abide by the laws of their jurisdiction, AO3 enforces the rights of creators to create without fear of censorship or arbitrary deletion. AO3 also operates entirely as a noncommercial and nonprofit organization with no ads or user fees, relying on a fan volunteer staff and annual fundraising drives.
Despite all the answers AO3 proposes to issues such as fan preservation, censorship, accessibility, and rights, many questions remain from both an archival and a fannish perspective about AO3’s role and functions as a community archive. Just who is included in this community “of Our Own?” What kind of cultural memory is being preserved, and how? What is included and what is left out? How does AO3’s commitment to freedom of the author relate to offensive content? If the subculture being documented in these records is, by nature, counterculture, why seek legitimacy from mainstream institutions? And in what ways does AO3 actually serve its users as a community archive, apart from making it easier to find a good read for a few hours?
Part III Sources
De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016.
Derecho, Abigail. “Archontic literature: a definition, a history, and several theories of fan fiction.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Hellekson K and Busse K. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Quoted in A. Lothian, “Archival Anarchies: Online Fandom, Subcultural Conservation, and the Transformative Work of Digital Ephemera,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 6 (2013): 545. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912459132
Johnson, Shannon Fay. "Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 17 (2014). Accessed December 10, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0578.
Lothian, Alexis. “Archival Anarchies: Online Fandom, Subcultural Conservation, and the Transformative Work of Digital Ephemera.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 6 (2013): 541–56. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912459132
Sheffield, Rebecka. “Community Archives.” In Currents of Archival Thinking, 2nd ed., edited by Heather MacNeil and Terry Eastwood, 351-376. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2017.
“Strikethrough and Boldthrough.” Fanlore. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough
Versaphile. “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History.” In "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6. (2011). Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.
Focus on the Fan-mily: Community Archiving and the Archive of Our Own
A five-part series on AO3 as a community archive, considering how archival theory and fandom history meet to create a ground-breaking fan archive experience like no other, and the possibilities this has for the archival profession moving forwards.
Full essay (with citations) here
Part I | Part III | Part IV | Part V
Part II - The Archival Theory Perspective
While there are many examples of websites with “archive” functions, AO3 distinguishes itself as an archival institution, one that embodies the qualities of a legitimate archive, with a focus on community and culture. Postmodern archival theory has expanded its understanding of what constitutes an archival institution by recognizing that many conventional definitions of formal organizations reinforce societal power dynamics and exclude records and memories from marginalized groups. Speaking broadly, the Encyclopedia of Archival Science recognizes that “any archival institution is people doing archival work,” and that no single definition of an archive covers all the ways in which people have done archival work. At the same time, archives and archival work does not consist of simply storing records for preservation. Far from being neutral repositories, archives and archivists identify records of lasting value by looking not at its content, as a library might, but at its origins, history and creator(s). Using this knowledge, they represent and describe these records and their relationships with the goals of both making them accessible to users and preserving them into an indefinite future. The decisions that archivists make in this work shape how current and future users understand the records in the archive — and by extension, the history, culture, and memory preserved in them.
From this baseline understanding of what archival work and institutions entail, community archives explore and challenge the boundaries of what records are, how they should be represented and described, who should make decisions about them, and where they should really belong. If archives represent a shared history or heritage, community archives challenge whose history is being represented and preserved, who makes decisions about what is represented and preserved, how they make those decisions, and where that history can be found. Community archives assert that mainstream or formal archives do not represent the voices of the marginalized and the non-elite, and that if they do so, it is through the viewpoint of the powerful. The community archive, rather, serves as a place of resistance and self-determination, where grassroots workers from the community “document, record, and explore community heritage” in such a way that the community itself is able to participate in the project and retain control and ownership over it. Crucially, as Andrew Flinn (2007) notes, the drive behind the project must come from the community itself - they may receive support from larger or even mainstream institutions, but the will for the archive and the ongoing direction of the work must lie within the community.
Because of this focus on community heritage and activities, community archives tend to have a broader scope when it comes to archival records. Generally, modern archival professionals agree that records are those materials which are “made and accrued in the course of the activities of organizations or individuals, and are closely connected with the activities in which they are made,” and archival records are those materials which a records manager or archivist have appraised and designated for long-term retention. In many archival contexts, particularly with business and government archives, records and archival records are often in documentary or textual form, although the personal collections of a family or individual may contain more variety. For community archives centred around the community’s own members and activities, which also may not privilege written forms of knowledge or follow a corporate structure, the contents of their collections may include more diverse and unorthodox record types — not just paper and digital records, but also audio-visual media, physical objects, oral testimonies, and any materials which represent the voices of those within the community.
In light of these general principles, AO3 occupies a peculiar niche as a self-proclaimed community archive, drawing on the ideas of archival theory while pushing at the boundaries of what a community archive can be. The OTW places a great deal of attention on AO3’s community-based nature, emphasizing that it is fan-created, fan-run, designed and maintained by fan volunteers, and funded entirely by fan donations. The purpose of all this is to provide a “noncommercial and nonprofit central hosting site for transformative fanworks such as fanfiction, fanart, fan videos and podfic.” Hosting sites, in and of themselves, are not archives, but what distinguishes AO3 from a well-run library site is the mandate behind the purpose. The mission of the OTW, which AO3 was created in service to, is “to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms.” Like archivists, the fans behind the OTW recognize a quality to their materials, their records, beyond their intellectual content. In addition to being creative works, the records archived on AO3 emerge from and reflect a complex context of fan history and culture, a provenance which requires a specialized knowledge to manage.
At the same time, AO3 presents a radical interpretation of what it means for an archive to be rooted in the community — site volunteers may manage and maintain AO3’s day-to-day operations, but it is fan community members who retain direct control over the records they contribute. While site operators have the ability to delete content that violates the site’s terms of service, power rests with the individual creators of each record as to how they wish to describe and represent their work, who is able to access it, and even how or whether the archive retains it. There is no archivist position — rather, it is the community members using the archive who directly make archival decisions about their records, with a behind-the-scenes team of community members overseeing the logistics. Although archival critics such as Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens and Elizabeth Shepherd (2009) hold that “the defining characteristic of community archives is the active participation of a community in documenting and making accessible the history of their particular group and/or locality on their own terms,” community autonomy and involvement at the creator level is rarely discussed. No matter how autonomous the community archive is, or how great the involvement from the community, discussion in the archival field on community archives operates from the assumption that there will be a designated person or team who takes on the responsibility of the archival work, operating with varying levels of input from the community. The AO3 model presents a radical departure from even the loosest version of this autonomy, asserting the rights and independence of the creator above any archivist figure. This includes the right to edit the record after publishing, to generate descriptions however they feel best represents their record, and the right to delete their records and remove themselves from the archive altogether. To any archivist, professional or not, any of these actions would cause no small amount of consternation. And yet for the fans behind AO3, it is one of the most important tenets of their work.
Part II Sources:
Flinn, Andrew. “Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 28, no. 2 (October 2007): 151-176. https://doi.org/10.1080/00379810701611936
Flinn, Andrew, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd. "Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream." Archival Science 9, no. 1-2 (2009): 71-86.
Nesmith, Tom. “Archives (Institution).” In Encyclopedia of Archival Science, edited by Luciana Duranti and Patricia C. Franks, 92-95. Roman and Littlefield, 2015.
Organization for Transformative Works. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://www.transformativeworks.org
Yeo, Geoffrey. “Record(s).” In Encyclopedia of Archival Science, edited by Luciana Duranti and Patricia C. Franks, 315-318. Roman and Littlefield, 2015.
Focus on the Fan-mily: Community Archiving with the Archive of Our Own
A five-part series on AO3 as a community archive, considering how archival theory and fandom history meet to create a ground-breaking fan archive experience like no other, and the possibilities this has for the archival profession moving forwards.
Full essay (with citations) here
Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V
Part I - Introduction: AO3, Working for You
Since its creation in 2008, the website Archive of Our Own (known colloquially as AO3), has had a meteoric rise in online fan communities. Run by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the website is a place where users can publish, read and review creative fan works derived from popular media. In addition to unique site features that enhance users’ experiences in publishing and accessing fan works, AO3 stands apart from other fan hosting sites with its deliberate claim to archival purpose and cultural memory. Its parent organization, the OTW, was created by fans in order to “serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms,” in service of which AO3 stands. Grounded in fan communities, AO3’s stated goals are to enable fan archives and social networking through the development of a free and open-source software, and to provide a non-commercial and non-profit centralized hosting place for fan works which is stable and protected from litigation. The OTW believes that fan works, or transformative works, are legal and permitted in copyright law, and advocates for fan creators’ rights within the law.
As a community-based archive “of our own,” this position does not always sit easy with the very fans that the OTW and AO3 claim to serve. Wary of mainstream acceptance and defiantly asserting their fan experience as one of sub-culture, fans question the legitimacy and the legality that OTW and AO3 advocate for. Why conform to the laws and social systems which have had a dubious history of persecuting and shaming fans? At the same time, AO3’s claims of being a cultural archive rest on traditional archival theories, but do so uneasily. Using new digital technologies, AO3 preserves an unorthodox type of record —the creative output of fans of popular media— in a highly democratized approach that prioritizes the rights of fan community members, especially the record creator(s), above all else. Indeed, while AO3 may follow the spirit of archival theories around community archiving, its execution challenges long-held conceptions of what an archive can be. It is a sort of “rogue archive,” as Abigail De Kosnik puts it: a form of archiving that eschews established archival precedents, prioritizes inclusion, accessibility and non-traditional media, and transforms archival work from an area of trained expertise to a practical and collaborative task that anyone can do.
Ultimately, AO3 takes a stance on control, a question important to many archivists and fan communities alike. Who has power over the knowledge that a community creates and accumulates? To both archivists and fans, and to the wider world, AO3 makes no bare bones about where it stands. Knowledge belongs to the people who create it, who have a right to keep it and manage it as they see fit, and AO3 was created by and for them. In its support of these people and their rights, AO3 offers a unique model for community archiving, access, and independence in a postmodern era. Combining the spirit of archival theory with the needs of its community members, AO3 reimagines the community archive as a place of active community and culture formation, development and redevelopment, where the language and the tools of legitimacy defend a modern fan sub-culture that continues to resist the commodification of community and creativity. At its heart, AO3 conceives of the archive as not just a space of memory, but an active tool in shaping a community’s culture, and accordingly, it does not take up any position as a hallowed hall of erudition and inviolable memory. Rather, AO3 functions always as a tool of and for its community.
Part I Sources:
De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016.
Organization for Transformative Works. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://www.transformativeworks.org
