In Fan Fiction in the Library, (previously quoted in this post) Price and Robinson find back in 2017
that LIS students tend to be aware of and engaged with fan fiction, even if they do not fully understand its nature.
Price, Ludi, and Lyn Robinson. 2017. “Fan Fiction in the Library.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.1090
Based on anecdotal experience, that made a nice understatement even nine years ago (and in such a changing field as the digital archiving of fandom, that can be a long time): if I were asked for three demographic groups that I think are the most likely to be aware of and engaged with fanfiction, library and information science students would have been up there with queers and furries. (Also, grabbing this chance to send my heartfelt admiration to all three groups.)
The significance of digital media to fandom was also something that these students were clear on.
[3.29] Most fan fiction is in digital format, which was a concern for many respondents. Participant 4 thought that a collection of fan fiction would not be viable “unless it were stored in a digital only aspect similar to the Internet Way Back machine.” Participant 15 thought that “there should be some kind of formal archiving by national libraries, but would this be done for online content via web archiving?” Participant 25 noted that it “would depend on the format, I don’t know how much fanfiction is printed I know a lot is available online so it would be a question of working with site owners over archiving.”
Price, Ludi, and Lyn Robinson. 2017. “Fan Fiction in the Library.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.1090
What might that knowledge translate to in the field?
Reyes Ayala, in a paper about misconceptions about web archives among institutional web archivists in 2021, reviews the literature on user behaviour, quality measurement and research engagement of web archives. There is some interesting work about whether we can have a measurement of the quality without usage and the different ways usage can be incorporated into these metrics.
When it comes to the use of web archiving in research, there are two kind of usage that the designers has to account for: the usage of the archival tool in creating the archive and the usage of the archive for research.
If we base the quality of an archive of whether it can be used as the original, certainly, aca-fans have an advantage in judging that. However, this also requires that the scholars designing the archive understand what makes it possible to use a website in a certain way. Furthermore, they need to be aware of how the archive might be used differently for the purpose of research as opposed to how the live website was used for its own purposes.
Reyes Ayala gathered from the literature that
general computational skills were most important for digital historians wishing to work with web archives.
Reyes Ayala, Brenda. 2021. “When expectations meet reality: common misconceptions about web archives and challenges for scholars.” International Journal of Digital Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-021-00034-3
The point here is not that every scholar researching digital fandoms need to have certain skills in computing (the relevant skills are certainly useful and many scholars do study them during their research) but that this knowledge must be accounted for the entire archival process from the very beginning of designing or selecting the archival tools.
Author: Szabó Dorottya