{"id":12357,"date":"2022-08-15T15:18:15","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T15:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/08\/15\/archive-of-our-owns-15-year-journey-from-blog-post-to-fanfiction-powerhouse\/"},"modified":"2022-08-15T15:18:17","modified_gmt":"2022-08-15T15:18:17","slug":"archive-of-our-owns-15-year-journey-from-blog-post-to-fanfiction-powerhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/08\/15\/archive-of-our-owns-15-year-journey-from-blog-post-to-fanfiction-powerhouse\/","title":{"rendered":"Archive of Our Own\u2019s 15-year journey from blog post to fanfiction powerhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/8\/15\/23200176\/history-of-ao3-archive-of-our-own-fanfiction<\/a>
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In May 2007, fanfiction and traditionally published author Naomi Novik wrote a post on LiveJournal. \u201cWe are sitting quietly by the fireside, creating piles and piles of content around us, and other people are going to look at that and see an opportunity,\u201d she wrote<\/a>, referring to LiveJournal\u2019s booming fanfiction community. <\/p>\n

She feared that the community was open to exploitation. Where fanfic was a primarily female hobbyist space, a group of men had stepped onto the scene promoting FanLib, a commercialized site that would be populated with fan content. Though it garnered 25,000 members, it was also the subject of intense criticism by many people involved in fandom at the time who felt stung by having a group of perceived outsiders attempt to profit off work they had always provided freely. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe people behind FanLib don\u2019t actually care about fanfic, the fanfic community, or anything except making money off content created entirely by other people and getting media attention. They don\u2019t have a single fanfic reader or writer on their board; they don\u2019t even have a single woman on their board,\u201d Novik wrote. She was clear about the solution to prevent their potential exploitation by these outside forces: \u201cWe need a central archive of our own.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Organization for Transformative Works, or OTW, a nonprofit with many arms all dedicated to preserving and advocating for fanworks, was founded a few months later. Archive of Our Own, now probably the best known and most popular fanfiction site on the web, was fully launched by 2009.<\/p>\n

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Star Trek fanzines were an early catalyst for fanfiction.<\/em>
\n<\/figcaption>Photo by Andrew Matthews\/PA Images via Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n

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When I speak to Novik, she starts the story much earlier, around 1997. Fanfiction archives were common at the time but were hosted by individuals and often subject to technical difficulties, the worst of which could erase people\u2019s hard work for good. Novik was a self-taught programmer, and when a friend\u2019s The<\/em> Sentinel<\/em> fanfic archive started breaking, she bought a suite of Perl scripts to be able to help out. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat formed a lot of my initial ideas of what things are important in an archive,\u201d she says. Much of this was described in the now-famous \u201carchive of our own\u201d post and made it complete into the site now commonly referred to as AO3, like highly searchable pages, a robust tagging system, and an easy-to-use recommendation method. <\/p>\n

Now familiar with the scripts, Novik began running Yuletide, a holiday season fanfiction exchange program that began in 2003, using the same software. Her visibility within fandom grew, and she gained what she refers to as \u201ca kind of reputational credit,\u201d which would go on to be crucial in getting volunteers involved in forming the OTW.<\/p>\n

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