Open Doors Committee

Who We Are

The Open Doors committee works to preserve fanworks: both physical and digital. We as a committee lead the OTW’s Open Doors Project. Our mission is to archive fanworks for the future while respecting their creators. We carry out this mission through several different subprojects, including:

  • The Online Archive Rescue Project (OARP), which works with archive moderators to import offline or at-risk online archives to the Archive of Our Own (AO3) or provide alternate preservation strategies.
  • The Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP), which partners with the University of Iowa and other institutions to facilitate the donation of fanzines.
  • The AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP), which works with fanzine creators and publishers to import fanzine works to AO3.

We collaborate with almost every other OTW committee in some capacity. We work with Communications to signal-boost relevant news, and publicize announcements about digital imports to the AO3, large donations to the FCPP, and other outreach efforts. We also work with Translation to translate these archive announcements, especially for non-English language archives.

We work with the Fanlore committee to document the fanworks we preserve (either digitally or through the FCPP and FSHP). Check out the Open Doors page on Fanlore to learn more about the archives we’ve imported.

Legal and Tag Wrangling advise us on issues that touch their areas of expertise. Legal also reviews updates to moderator agreements and Memorandums of Understanding which are the contracts between the moderator archivists and the Open Doors Committee.

Systems provides us technical expertise on how imports may affect AO3’s server load, helps us set up redirects from an original archive to its imported collection on AO3, and transfers ownership of the domains of at-risk archives from the current moderator to the OTW. Systems also helps Open Doors host banners (or other media files) of imported archives on OTW servers.

Internal Structure

Open Doors is led by a small Chair team consisting of Chairs and Chair Assistants. Collectively, the Chair team is responsible for volunteer recruitment, training, and management and ensures that our committee is working toward our goals for maintaining and expanding Open Doors’ main projects.

Although our and other committees’ sizes vary due to recruitment and retirements, Open Doors is frequently the third largest OTW committee with 50 or more volunteers. These volunteers are divided into several roles:

  • Administrative Volunteers and Administrative Support Volunteers assist with shaping the direction of the committees’ projects and are responsible for coordinating the administrative side of our archive and fanzine imports on AO3.
  • FSHP Volunteers are responsible for fanzine scanning, OCR, copyediting, proofreading, and importing works for the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project.
  • Import Assistants do much of the work of importing archives which cannot be imported through automated processes, and related data-entry type tasks needed for the OARP and FSHP.
  • Technical Volunteers do the coding necessary to facilitate large archive imports through automated processes.

Graphics

Open Doors infographic with four sections 1 Offers shelter to fanworks at risk of being lost or discarded 2 Transfers digital archives to their own spaces within the Archive of Our Own 3 Facilitates the transfer of physical fan creations to partner libraries and institutions 4 Works with creators and publishers to import transcribed fics and scanned artwork from fanzines to the Archive

Line graph titled ‘Fanworks Migrated Through Open Doors’. It features a line graph tracking the number of fanworks added to AO3 from 2013 to 2023. The vertical axis is labeled ‘Number of Rescued Fanworks’, beginning at zero and going up to 45,000 in increments of 5,000. The horizontal axis is labeled ‘Year’ and lists each year from 2013 through 2023. The line begins in 2013 with approximately 5,000 fanworks, dips slightly in 2014 and 2015, rises sharply to peak at over 40,000 in 2017, then declines dramatically to around 5,000 by 2019. It shows a gradual increase post-2019 with a notable rise in 2022, and a slight decline in 2023. The total digital fanworks rescued by the year through Open Doors equals 136,891 works from 101 archives.

Contact Us

If you want to learn more about the Open Doors committee, or if you have any other questions, please contact us—we will be happy to hear from you.