[ SECRET POST #6078 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6078 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 32 secrets from Secret Submission Post #869.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

What definition of "archive" are you using here, because it kind of seems like it's probably a very pedantic one.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean I supposed by the broadest definition - an archive is a place that collects lots of stuff - AO3 is an archive. And it's an archive by the definition that's current in fandom, for sure.

But in a like, non-internet sense, an archive is an institution that collects documents and records that are unpublished or were published elsewhere in order to preserve them long-term. It is not, crucially, a publisher or distributor itself. There are probably many times more private archives where nothing is available to the public than there are archives that operate like AO3, and RL archives almost always prioritize preservation over accessibility.

The first online fanfiction collections that called themselves "archives" did have a lot in common with offline archives - they collected fanfics that had been published elsewhere but in ephemeral forms (mostly in the email and Usenet groups people were mentioning above) and preserved them in a place that was less ephemeral than an email or usenet group. (Some of them - like Gossamer that's still up - automatically archived anything sent to the groups with no input from the authors at all.) Some of the email groups had "archives" that were literally just the Yahoogroups archives of the emails sent to the list.

But a lot of those early archives were, crucially, also published online, and so in fandom "archive" started to drift to mean "website that publishes fanfic".

AO3 institutionally, and some of its users, think it is an archive in the sense of "collects documents published elsewhere to preserve them". It tries to base its policies on the idea that it is a place that collects documents published elsewhere in order to preserve them. However, it is bad at preservation and good at distribution and at this point the vast, vast majority of its fics have never been published anywhere else, and the vast, vast majority of its users treat it as a publisher, not an archive.