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
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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
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
@Lady Does scale not come into this?
Like can't you do more with a smaller-scale focus area?
@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
@Lady Scale as in size of community served -- and so, moderation burden in terms of complex social dynamics to be responsible for, and also burden in terms of amount of input and amount of demand.
Although a small enough amount of works allows feasible tradeoffs from technically-implemented features to manual curation activities done as part of the moderation-process of ingesting new submissions.
Like if you look at the Darth Maul Estrogen Brigade, they have (well, had, I think. The site was still up last I checked but I don't think they've been active since the early 00s?) iirc chronological, subject-oriented, and a few other different views -- that would be database queries on e.g. AO3 -- that are simply manually maintained HTML pages.
(I'd also look at the PPC, here. I don't KNOW how they're organized, but I think they're still active. I love their forum, as a piece of technical work -- it's my idealized model of where software dev should fit in society.)
@Lady Also I think you're putting reliability as "always up" or "always down" while I think practically it could be a healthy and successful part of a community's infrastructure with, like, between one and two 9s of uptime if they have a space to say "sorry, will be down for a few days -- cat chewed a wire and I have finals. Hold your uploading until the weekend? Thanks."
@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 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
@Lady I think you can have an archive (or is it a library?) of 100 things.
https://www.dmeb2.com/authors/index.html
I also think you can have a ~500-1000(? I'm bad at visually estimating) book library with single librarian. I think that is what an in-person group I was in had, with Librarian being a rotating elected title and checkout being a composition book with a pen and columns that you got shown how to write your name and the book name/isbn into and write "returned" when you returned it, and sometimes they'd give a call like "hey I need some hands to do a one-time sort of the library (by author + one of the three genres we had), it's gotten a bit messy" and people would tap in to help.
Is that not a library? Or is that sort of lower-req library-having something you can only do in meatspace, not digitally?
@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
