My Progress of City project
world 1 - 11,05,2022
20,05,2022
22,05,2022
world 2 - 30,05,2022 - 9,08,2022
world 3 - 20,10,2022 - 29,10,2022
12,11,2022 - 14,11,2022
world 4 - 13,03,2023 - 28,03,2023
6,04,2023
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I don't like wading into Ao3 debates, but I want to give my professional opinion on Ao3 with regard to archives vs. libraries.
I am a professional librarian (MSLS) and I have worked in both archives and public libraries and a lot of the confusion and concern I see surrounding Ao3 is a fundamental misunderstanding of How Archives Work.
An archive is a collection related to a subject. That subject is often a person but sometimes a field or concept or project. And the purpose of an archive is to keep everything. And I mean everything. I was going to say "short of biohazards" but since I know there's a sealed R. Crumb Devil Gal chocolate bar in the UNC Chapel Hill archives, we really do mean everything.
When a collection of materials--which are usually unique and original and can be photos, manuscripts, letters, recordings (audio and/or visual), notes and notebooks, objects, published books, whatever--on and/or from the subject arrive at the archive, they are examined, preserved for longevity, accessioned and cataloged (added to the archive's records), and added to the archive. You measure collections in linear feet. As in, once it's all preserved and boxed and secure, you note how many feet of shelf space it takes up. And some of y'all on Ao3 have a lot of linear feet to your name (and I'm proud of you).
This is an archive: it is designed to preserve the original materials related to a subject. That is its purpose. Archives are how we have the original scroll manuscript of On the Road, for example, or the Lomax recordings of American folksongs, or Tijuana Bibles, or James Joyce's loveletters to Nora.
Now you, a member of the public, can access some archives. Some are easier to access than others. The one I worked in was open to the public; good luck getting into the British Archives without a good reason.
So now apply this to Ao3--which is an archive both in name and in purpose. It is intended to preserve fan-created content long term. And this means everything, whether you personally like the materials or not. It is a repository for as much as possible.
And the "whether you personally like the materials or not" is important, hence why I mentioned Jim's loveletters and Tijuana Bibles in particular. (RIP Jim, you would have loved pegging.)
If it's made by fans and it exists, we should keep it to document the history and progression of fandom. That is the point. We have lost enough materials related to the subject of fans of media and we don't need to lose any more.
The fact of the matter is that Ao3 is only one facet of the OTW, which preserves other fan-related materials (convention booklets and zines, for example). Somehow Ao3, an archive on the subject of fanfiction, has been divorced from the rest of the project, mostly by way of "purity culture" and panic over "dangerous" fiction.
The fact that you can go through an archive and find interesting information is the other side of archives. No, they shouldn't be like the banker's box of old letters stuffed in my closet. Yes, they should be organized and as accessible as is appropriate for the state of the materials.
It's really, really cool to find stuff in an archive, I'm not even going to lie. I have done it before and I will do it again. And yet there are other items in an archive that I might not want or need or be interested in at all--but they're still there. That's the cataloging and accessioning: to keep up with what's there, to stay "on topic" with collecting, and to be able to find things in that archive. Bless the tag wranglers who are doing the cataloging at Ao3.
The pearl clutching seems to come from 1. the creation of "dangerous" fanworks and 2. public access to those "dangerous" fanworks. These are issues of "purity culture" and opinions on censorship and should not involve Ao3.
Ao3, under the umbrella of the OTW, is a documentation and preservation project first and foremost.
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Reasons why Jon Archivist is truly a character of all time:
Had the police called on him several times when he was a young child
Keeps his rib and the ashes of the season one antagonist next to his stationary drawer
Promised he wouldn’t get lost in tunnels and then immediately got lost in aforementioned tunnels
Has no clue what a joke is
Learned how remarkably easy it is to buy an ax in central London
Had to have two separate interventions
Told people his place of employment before traumatising them for life
The first character he ever said ‘I love you’ to is a cat
Allegedly participated in amdram
Watches documentaries and collects some kind of weird shit (my headcanon is Soviet Union postcards) when he’s not being a paranoid mess
Canonically looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks
Knows nothing about library science
Fell head over heels for a man that he hated until he learned he lied on his resumé
Has been referred to as Jesus or Jesus-adjacent at least twice
Asexual icon
Knows what a meme is and said “LOL” in the first episode
Rode on a merry-go-round sometime during his university days because he was in a weird place emotionally
Died for our Jonathan Sins
Is probably a computer now playing minesweeper with his boyfriend and evil 200+ year old boss
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