We are the Open Doors project, dedicated to offering shelter to at-risk fannish content. We have several subprojects and rescue efforts aimed at archiving and preserving different kinds of fanworks and artifacts of fan culture.
Our mission is to preserve fanworks for the future while respecting their creators.
Our values are:
- Respecting creators and each other
- Working together as a team
- Providing excellent customer service
- Respecting and encouraging diversity
- Openly/effectively communicating with each other, other OTW committees, and the community
- Completing tasks and responding to communications from mods, creators, other OTW committees, and each other in a timely fashion
- Being dedicated to continually improving our processes, including in response to community and internal feedback
- Believing that all archives and fanworks have intrinsic value and are created equal
- Formalizing and documenting standard processes to follow
- Equipping our volunteers with training to know and act in accordance with our mission, values, and established processes
Our work includes:
- Online Archives: The Online Archives page links to the rescued archives and challenges hosted at the Archive of Our Own, which represent the majority of the work undertaken by Open Doors.
- Special Collections: The Special Collections Gallery includes digital projects which cannot currently be integrated into the Archive or Fanlore. These include .pdfs, multimedia fanworks, historically important fan sites, and other digital artifacts.
- Fan Culture Preservation Project: A joint venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa to archive and preserve fanzines and other non-digital forms of fan culture.
- GeoCities Rescue Project: A project dedicated to preserving fan sites which would otherwise have been lost through Yahoo’s closing of GeoCities in October 2009.
- Yahoo Groups Rescue Project: A project dedicated to preserving fanfiction, fanart, and meta from Yahoo Groups which would otherwise have been lost through Verizon’s closing of Yahoo Groups in January 2020.
For more information about the Open Doors project and our processes, please visit our FAQ.