Lady @Lady@cat.family

stop showing me classic websites which are cool show me current websites which are cool

@Satsuma no

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries

@gaditb sometimes in Unicode they will propose a character with a justification like “does this character see active contemporary use? well, it sees use in historical documents, and historical documents are in active use by contemporary historians.”

i want to channel a similar energy about “what fans want out of a fan archive”. do fan archives need to support research? yes, because some fans are researchers, and researchers need support for research in their archives. do fan archives need to support librarianship? yes, because some fans are librarians, and librarians need support for librarianship in their archives. and you may counter this by saying that not every archive needs to be everything for every person, but you do have to recognize that this is an anti‐academic sentiment when the “thing” you are refusing to support are academic approaches to information management

we have agreed as a society that most books which are published should have catalog records and show up in WorldCat (not an endorsement) and (in the United States) be entered into the Library of Congress and be assigned subject headings and indeed have the Library of Congress record be printed on the copyright page for easy reference in many cases. this is not because average readers care too much about these things, but because taking these steps with every book improves and increases the information resources and literacy of our society.

if you don’t think fanworks should be treated similarly, then you think that fanworks are lesser or different somehow than books. some fans may feel this way, but that is certainly not a universal opinion. for the fans who do think that fanworks can be books, there is not the technical infrastructure to support that treatment.

so while i am listing “librarianship” and “what fans want out of a fan archive” as separate things, because you can understand one without the other, it is with the understanding that fan behaviour is multifaceted and includes librarianship within it

Apple Inc i respectfully ask you what the fuck

i wasn¦t going to make it play music but for stuff on archive.org there is no reason not to let it play music…

experimenting with a thing

@gaditb people publish stories on the internet because they want strangers to read them. (if you do not want strangers to read your story, do not publish it on the internet.) the purpose of a fan archive (which is not a real archive, but that is what they are called) is to connect strangers with stories that they want to read. the goodness/success of a fan archive is thus measured (among other things) by how well it manages to connect (the right) strangers with the stories in its holdings.

it is not hard to do a bad job of this. just post some links online. but it is hard to do a good job of this. and the latter case is what i am talking about

@gaditb a little bit of A and a little bit of B i think

it is a lot easier to manage and arrange physical books on a shelf compared to digital records—in part because a book is a fixed material object that encodes its information on its spine, whereas in digital space you have to enter the metadata for the object yourself; in part because computer screens are much more linear and much less spatial than a bookshelf, where you can easily glance across 100 titles at the same time, so good organization and navigation and search is more necessary in digital environments; in part because the demands of users in physical space are often less than the demands of users in digital space on account of physical space sucking less (you can flip through the pages of a book much easier when it is printed and not on a screen). bookshelves also do not require maintenance or development the way that computer systems do; they never need patches or upgrades and they take a very long time to wear out

on the other hand, i think you have an overly simplistic vision of what librarianship entails and also on what fans want out of a fan archive. the goal of a library is not to be an island but to be a participant in a larger community of cultural heritage institutions, researchers, and everyday users with diverse needs. if my local library does not have a book i want to be able to ILL it; i don’t want to be restricted to the books in the Little Free Library down the street. acquisitions, cataloguing, tagging, authority management, etc are all accepted parts of “library science” today and i think it is fair to say that a bookshelf in a room is not a “library” as we contemporarily conceive of the institution, even if we still call these things “libraries” in a non-institutional sense

@gaditb my point is that it takes a village to run a library. you can¦t just have one technician and one librarian, or one technician who is also a librarian. you need people in these different roles. and you can respond by saying that building a library is too ambitious, but then what you are building is definitely not a library

@gaditb sure, but my point is that these are different disciplines

it is not reasonable or sustainable to have the same person doing all of these tasks regardless of how large any of them are, because the number of hats is still too high. context switching is a fixed cost and nobody is an expert in everything. you can reduce number of hours per month much easier than you can reduce number of people

sure, you can get around some of this if you say, don’t care about users being able to search for works and don’t have sophisticated tagging because your archive only has 10 things in it (but what makes it an “archive” at that point and not just… a blog?)

@gaditb define scale? scale as in number of works only matters when the number of works is large. when the number of works is small the scale that matters is number of features.

moderation, website reliability, and discovery/search are three features which each require specialists and each are a requirement for any fan archive. there is no point having an archive which is not discoverable, not moderated, and always down

add a programmer to implement these features and a manager for coordinating them and there is your five

if four other lesbians who don¦t hate each other and don¦t have terrible takes were each willing to commit 10hr/month to make this happen, sign me up

never met them tho

you need an ops girlie, you need a programmer girlie, you need a metadata girlie, you need a moderator girlie, you need a project manager girlie

yes these all have to be different people

the problem with fan archives is that to do it right you need a staff of five people and i have never seen one with a staff larger than like, two