Frequently Asked Questions - For Archivists
There are several advantages to backing up or transferring your fanworks.
- Long-term preservation. Your archive will be maintained and supported even if you lose internet access, interest, or time. Your zines will be preserved for future generations to admire and enjoy.
- Infrastructure. The OTW is set up to bring in volunteers as well as provide advice and technical help for maintaining and growing your collection or project.
- Encouraging contributions. Volunteers and contributors are more likely to invest their time and energy in a project when they have a real expectation that their work will be preserved into the future.
- Financial support in a nonprofit environment. The OTW will never exploit your work or the work of your contributors for individual profit.
While the Archive of Our Own welcomes fanworks of all kinds, our resources for supporting projects that can not be easily integrated to the Archive are limited. While we are open to talking to the maintainer of any fannish project which needs our help, we are not providing general hosting like an ISP. A special project that requires its own server space or other resources will need to be approved by the Board as a special collection before it is brought on.
The maintainer of a collection brought on under Open Doors also has to agree to the Open Doors Terms of Service.
We are happy to help the maintainers of existing archives to transfer the contents of their archives into the Archive of Our Own (AO3).
Currently, we are able to mass import archives that have been built with the Automated Archive software; an e-fiction importer is also in the works. If your archive has been built with other software, please contact us: we may be able to offer a customized solution or other help. Open Doors also assists moderators of smaller archives with manual imports.
Archives will be preserved within the AO3 using the Collections feature, and the moderator of the original archive will be invited to moderate the collection within the AO3. If the moderator no longer wishes to be involved with the archive, other arrangements can be made to assure that the archive collection is maintained.
In cases where the original archive site and address are still available, we also may be able to set up automatic redirecting from the original URLs to the new locations in the AO3, preserving existing links, but this can’t be guaranteed. We also welcome maintainers who wish to back up the contents of their archives in the AO3.
Archives that have been integrated into the Archive of Our Own will also be listed in the Open Doors gallery.
Contact Open Doors for access to the archive importer. Please let us know from the outset if you have special needs — for example, if you'd like us to take over maintenance of the old domain, or if your archive contains multimedia content.
In early 2009, Open Doors launched the Fan Culture Preservation Project in conjunction with the Special Collections Department at the University of Iowa Libraries. This project is dedicated to preserving fan artifacts such as letterzines, fanzines, and other non-digital fan works and memorabilia. Contact the Open Doors committee for more information about donating zines or other artifacts of fan culture to the Fan Culture Preservation Project.
You may not have written all the stories, but if you’re the moderator of an archive, you’ve accepted responsibility for keeping them online and accessible. We think that transferring an archive into the AO3 is along the same lines as changing web host or ISP, or installing an updated software package for the archive; it’s like a librarian moving a collection.