CFP: FanLIS 2022: Fan futures – beyond the archive

Posted on 24 November 2021 by Ludovica Price

Image © Ludi Price CC-BY-NC-SA

Call for Presentations

FanLIS 2022 is a one day CityLIS symposium to explore the intersection between fandom, fan studies, and library and information science. May 19^th 2022, online event (possibly hybrid, hosted at City, University of London).

Fan studies has long been interested in the archive as a site of preservation and resistance. Examples include the work of Versaphile (2011), Lothian (2012), Brett (2013) and Jansen (2020).

In this symposium we seek to broaden this horizon, and look at fan work production through the lens of the entire information communication chain, including creation, storage, management, dissemination, circulation, preservation, meaning-making and (re)use. Creation of fanworks goes beyond the textual, and includes a multitude of formats, from the analogue and physical – costumes, figurines, dolls – to the digital – game assets, fanfilms, memes. Fandom, and its culture of collecting, ensures that it is a site of continued physicality and materiality, yet the digital has revolutionised (and continues to revolutionise) how material objects move through their lifecycle. For example, how are collections of complex fanworks, such as custom figurines, stored? How do fans manage their gaming mods? What methods do cosplayers use to disseminate their works? In what ways do non-digital fanworks circulate throughout the fan community? How is technology changing the way that fanworks are published? What are the legal implications of fanfilms? We welcome presentations that seek to answer these and similar questions, as well as ones that consider what the future of the fan information communication chain might be.

The information communication chain. @lynrobinson cc-by

In addition, we also seek to look beyond the archive solely as a site of the preservation of fan culture, and highlight the ways in which the archive – both online and offline – can be subverted by both their creators and users, be it through technology, usage. Fans themselves are instrumental in building and maintaining archives, and more than this – in developing best practice that can inform current practice within existing cultural memory institutions.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations relating to the lifecycle of fanworks, from both LIS (Library & Information Science) and fan studies perspectives. We also encourage work that presents perspectives from non-Western and transcultural standpoints.

Publishing fanfiction – futures and forecasts (FSNNA21 #FanLIS abstract)

Posted on 20 October 2021 by Ludovica Price

Just sharing the abstract to the #FanLIS panel at FSNNA21, for anyone who’s interested!

Publishing fanfiction – futures and forecasts

Library and Information Science (LIS) has always been concerned with the documentation and dissemination of information, and this includes the publication of creative works. In more recent years, LIS has begun to look beyond traditional information behaviours – for example, in this context – traditional publishing methods, both on- and offline – and towards the practices of amateurs, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and, even more lately, fans.

Fans are some of the first to utilise the affordances of new technologies to create, share and disseminate both information and fanworks. We have seen this from the earliest days of modern fandom, where Xeroxing technologies were used to share fanworks via fanzines, which were then disseminated through postal networks. We also see this with digital technology. “Fans”, as Henry Jenkins asserted in 2006, “were early adopters of digital technologies” (p.138); and De Kosnik (2016) reminds us that fans “were early developers and practitioners of both online archive building and archontic production” (p.11). As the internet became mainstream, fanfiction came to be published and shared on Listserv and Usenet, migrating from platform to platform as the World Wide Web became more sophisticated – from personal websites to Fanfiction.net, to Livejournal and Dreamwidth, to the more dynamic platforms of Web 2.0, such as Wattpad and AO3. Now, with the proliferation of social media, we see fic becoming more dynamic and collaborative on micro-blogging sites such as Twitter or Tumblr. And with the rise of print-on-demand technology, affordable publishing has been made possible for various fanworks, including fanfiction – a practice which is still taboo in fan communities.

Likewise, the pathways from fic to mainstream publication have seen a trend towards democratisation. Peckosie and Hill (2015) chart the unprecedented journey Master of the Universe took to transform into Fifty Shades of Grey, a pathway smoothed by the activism of fans, online forums, and social media. This unorthodox route to mainstream (and staggeringly successful) publication has opened up the opportunity for fic authors to sell their work by ‘filing off the serial numbers’, but also openly acknowledge – and even celebrate – the origins of their works in fan culture. Publishers now welcome, and even actively seek out, fanfic that already has a proven track record of success with its readership, that comes with an already built-in audience of ready-made consumers. Hugely successful fiction series, such as the After and Mortal Instruments series, have followed this model, going from popular fanfictions to film franchises. These routes to publication, fuelled by ‘fan power’ and readers as ‘active agents in the process’ (Peckosie & Hill, 2015, p.609), have rarely been given attention within LIS, as with most information practices that demonstrate heterarchical or bottom-up structures.

This portion of the roundtable asks a series of simple questions: what is the future of fanfiction publication? What formats will fanfiction take? Will fanfiction broaden from simply text to something more immersive, more immediately sensorial? Can we forecast where it will go next?

References:

De Kosnik, A. (2016). Rogue archives: digital cultural memory and media fandom. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture. New York: New York University Press.

Peckosie, J., and Hill, H. (2015). Beyond traditional publishing models: an examination of the relationships between authors, readers, and publishers. Journal of Documentation, 71 (3). http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JD-10-2013-0133

‘Fan literacy’ – on my conversation with Dr. Matt Finch

Posted on 19 February 2021 by Ludovica Price

Last Autumn I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Dr. Matt Finch, as part of his ongoing column in CILIP’s Information Professional magazine. Matt’s column explores new notions of literacy in the 21st century, and, in a world where many young people learn to navigate digital and online spaces through fandom, we were able to discuss how ‘fan literacy’ is one of the most important ways that information literacy is achieved particularly among younger generations of internet users. Yet information literacy is rarely discussed in these terms.

My interest in the liminal spaces between fandom and LIS really began in 2009, when I joined an online fan community for The Sims computer game, called CTO Sims (sadly now defunct). Apart from the main forum, there was also an archive of sorts – a space where fan-made custom content from this old game was collected, stored, and curated. Over time, I became an administrator and informal ‘archivist’ of the site, and it never ceased to amaze me how information literate we all were as a community – even though I never thought about it in terms of information literacy at the time. Some of us would go on ‘rescue missions’, downloading custom content en masse before the host site could go down, using rudimentary tools such as the DownThemAll Firefox extension. If a site had already gone down, we’d see what we could salvage using the Wayback Machine. We arranged everything in our archive according to site, function, and type. It was digital archivism. All done by passionate fans and amateurs.

But CTO Sims was much more than this. As a community it was a place to share, to learn, to teach. People wrote tutorials and FAQ’s. Members came together to build beautiful, virtual worlds in monthly contests, and celebrated events by gifting the custom-content they had made. Others created themed rec lists, pointing members in the direction of the best sites to find what they wanted for their builds. And the old-timers mentored the ‘newbies’ in the skills they’d taught themselves over the years.

My custom-made X-Men Sims in a virtual Danger Room.

I learned how to mesh and create game assets through the CTO Sims community. I wanted X-Men for my Sims game, and there weren’t any, so I had to learn how to make them myself. And when I couldn’t find all the appropriate items to build the Danger Room in my virtual Xavier Institute, I had to learn to make those items myself too. These are not soft skills. These are hard, tech skills, ones that I learned not by going on a course, but by reading the tutorials written by fellow fans, by the mentoring of those in the community who had also had to teach themselves. And what we created, we shared. We announced them with pride. We turned our new skills into making gifts for the rest of the community, uploading them to the archive so anyone could download them.

When I started my Library Science Masters at CityLIS, I began to see the overlaps between what we were doing in CTO Sims and LIS. That overlap, between passionate fandom and LIS, became the foundation of my Masters dissertation, which ended up being a virtual ethnography of the information behaviour within CTO Sims. What I found was that CTO Sims was an information eco-system, in complex and exciting ways – informal and non-proscriptive ways, to be sure – but in a manner that was rich and vibrant. And as I continue on my journey both as a fan and as an information professional, I see that richness, that vibrancy, throughout the fan communities I inhabit.

As I explained to Matt, fandom is place where new kinds of expertise are developed, ones that can rise to challenges and problems in new and innovative ways. Being a fan doesn’t necessarily mean you are a qualified computer science professional, but it doesn’t stop you from coming together with other fans to build a tagging system that does away with most of the inherent messiness of traditional folksonomies, and is probably the envy of many a professional subject heading authority. It doesn’t stop you from using your language skills to create scanlations (fan-made translations) of manga for fellow fans. It doesn’t stop K-pop stans from using their fancams to protest far right political discourse on Twitter. And it doesn’t stop Sims fans from teaching the community how to game mod.

This is what I mean by ‘fan literacy’ – fandom isn’t merely a place to squee and geek out (though there is that). It’s a place to learn to navigate the digital world in a way that is sometimes completely outside the box. You don’t solve problems because you have to – you solve them because you want to, sometimes obsessively so. You don’t go looking for information because it’s work; you do it because it’s play. Fan literacy, fan information literacy, is pleasurable, sociable, generous and ludic. And it sticks. Because it satisfies a core need within us – the need to create… and the need to belong.

You can read Matt Finch’s column on fan literacy in the Jan-Feb 2021 issue of Information Professional; or you can listen to our hour-long interview here.

booksadventures · Fandom & Information Literacy Discussion with Dr Ludi Price

This post was originally posted on the CityLIS FanLIS project blog.

Fandom & Information Literacy Discussion with Dr Matt Finch

Posted on 13 November 2020 by Ludovica Price

It’s been a long while since I posted here, what with the COVID19 pandemic and various other personal and professional upheavals. I haven’t been entirely neglecting my research interests, however! A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by the wonderful Dr. Matt Finch about fandom and information literacy. We had so much fun with our discussion, it lasted over an hour!

If you’re interested in hearing more about the intersections between fandom and library and information science, do have a listen. I managed to fit quite a lot in there – and somehow not enough!

And for those disappointed that #FanLIS didn’t go ahead – watch this space!

booksadventures · Fandom & Information Literacy Discussion with Dr Ludi Price

CFP: Building Bridges: exploring interdisciplinary intersections between fandom, fan studies and library and information science.

Posted on 11 October 2019 by Ludovica Price

Image © Ludi Price CC-BY-NC-SA

Call for Presentations – all authors welcome!

One day CityLIS symposium to explore the intersection between fandom, fan studies and library and information science. April 9^th 2020 at City, University of London.

Recently the fan studies community has become interested in building bridges between different cultures and disciplines, with Dr. Naomi Jones, during the Fan Studies Network Conference 2018, emphasising the importance of interdisciplinarity in moving the field forward. This challenge was taken up by Kelley, Price, Schuster and Wang in the Fan Studies Network Conference of 2019, where they presented their interdisciplinary, collaborative project on fandom, which started in the Spring of 2018. This collaboration brought together scholars from the fields of cultural studies, the digital humanities, and library and information science to talk about fandom and fan practice, and has allowed a wider exchange of ideas between disciplines.

In common with fan studies, library and information science has a keen interest in the utility of their research outside the field, and in understanding to what extent it effects an impact outside its own disciplinary boundaries. For example, while library and information science (LIS) has a rich history of user studies, its impact outside of the field is less clear, despite multidisciplinary studies being shown to have more impact (Ellegaard & Wallin, 2015). Thus, it would seem that this is the perfect opportunity to bring members of these two disciplines – fan studies and LIS – together, in order to move the concept of ‘interdisciplinarity’ away from just a subject of conversation, towards something real and tangible.

Fan practice shows many parallels with the interests of information professionals, such as librarians, archivists and curators. Fans are ardent collectors (Geraghty, 2014); they take pride in the classification of their work; they develop best practice in the preservation of fanworks (Swalwell et al., 2017); and as some of the first adopters of the internet (Jenkins, 2006), they are comfortable using technological innovations which many information professionals have yet to embrace. Other fan activities with which LIS has overlapping engagement are the publishing of fanfiction as mainstream literature (Peckosie & Hill, 2015), classification of fanfiction, such as on the Archive of Our Own (Price, 2019), and copyright, to name but a few. Rarely, however, does LIS literature acknowledge the relevance of work carried out in the fan studies discipline, e.g. Versaphile’s (2011) look at the preservation of fannish history and Johnson’s (2014) look at fanfiction metadata. Likewise, there is little evidence that fan studies authors are aware of the rich troves of relevant work carried out within the LIS discipline. This creates a significant lacuna in knowledge, which could be assuaged by a less siloed approach to research conversations.

This symposium aims to be part of a nascent interdisciplinary dialogue, by bringing together scholars from fan studies, LIS and beyond, to find commonalities, inspire new conversations, and reveal hidden and unexpected intersections that will enrich the current discourse of fandom and fan practice.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute presentations relating to topics that draw links between, and are relevant to, issues both within fan studies, fandom and LIS, and to other liminal spaces associated with these disparate disciplines. We encourage work that presents perspectives from non-Western and transcultural standpoints.

Topics can include, but are not limited to, the following:

Beta-reading and the fan as editor
Classifying fanworks, e.g. tagging, fan genres
Fandom and libraries/archives/museums/galleries
Fanzines, and fan self-publishing
Fandom and information literacy
Fandom, education and peer-learning
Fandom and cultural memory
Crowdsourcing
Fan news and fans as ‘citizen journalists’
Fandom and the digital humanities
Fans as author
Fans as collectors and curators
Participatory culture
Fandom and social media
Preservation of fanworks, including complex objects such as costume, figurines, dolls, gaming mods, etc.
Collaborative projects between fans and cultural institutions such as libraries, archives and museums

Please send your 500 word proposals to both Ludi Price at Ludovica.Price@city.ac.uk and Lyn Robinson at lyn@city.ac.uk by midnight on December 31^st 2019.

Authors of successful proposals will be notified by January 31^st 2020. Presenters will be expected to make their own way to City, University of London, but there will be no charge for presenting at, or attending the event, which we hope will be accessible to all those interested in fandom and LIS.

We are looking into open access publishing options for the proceedings of this event.

EDIT 25 Oct 2019:

Authors are permitted to submit two proposals. To allow everyone a chance to present and to balance the programme, authors can expect that only one proposal will be accepted in the instance of a successful submission.

References

Ellegaard, O., and Wallin, J. A. (2015). The bibliometric analysis of scholarly production: How great is the impact? Scientometrics, 105(3), 1809-1831. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1645-z

Geraghty, L. (2014). Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture. Abingdon: Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Essays on Participatory Culture: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Johnson, S. F. (2014). Fan fiction metadata creation and utilization within fan fiction archives: three primary methods. Transformative Works and Cultures, 17. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0578

Peckosie, J., and Hill, H. L. (2015). Beyond traditional publishing models: an examination of the relationships between authors, readers, and publishers. Journal of Documentation, 71(3), 609-626. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-10-2013-0133

Price, L. (2019). Fandom, Folksonomies and Creativity: the case of the Archive of Our Own. In: Haynes, D. and Vernau, J. (eds.). The Human Position in an Artificial World: Creativity, Ethics and AI in Knowledge Organization, ISKO UK Sixth Biennial Conference London, 15-16th July 2019, 11-37. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783956505508-11

Swalwell, M., Ndalianis, A., and Stuckey, H. (eds.) (2017). Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives. New York: Routledge.

Versaphile (2011). Silence in the library: archives and the preservation of fannish history. Transformative Works and Cultures, 6. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277

This is a cross post originally published on the CityLIS blog.

A Model of Fan Information Behaviour

Posted on 30 January 2019 by Ludi Price

It’s been well over a year since I completed my thesis and earned my PhD. Since then I’ve had time to reflect on what I learned, and on my findings. There are several findings that I think would be worth investigating and expanding upon in the future, but one of the most important of these is the model of fan information behaviour that I developed through my research.

Model of Fan Information Behaviour

This model is based upon my research findings, and highlights some of the unique information behaviour that fans display, particularly the following:

The constant reuse of information and resources in the creation of the fan text, and even the source text;
The use of information in the creation of two types of works – encyclopaedic/affirmational works (i.e works that affirm the source text), and transformative works (i.e. works that build upon, expand and transform the source text);
A general ambivalence towards copyright;
Information does not merely take textual or artistic forms – semiotic and enunciative forms are also important;
Some fans act as mentors in the passing on of knowledge towards ‘novice’ fans, albeit generally in what might be considered an amateur capacity (i.e. fans are not experts in the traditional sense);
Money-making and entrepreneurial activities can be part of the information flows;
Complex relationships exist between fans-fans and fans-producers, e.g. friendships, activism, charity, support, etc.

This model is meant to be a general one; i.e. it is meant to be applicable to all types of media fans, of all different fandoms. As such, it would be interesting to have this model tested on individual fandoms or fan communities in the future, and see whether it can be either validated or further refined and improved.

NB: please note that the use of ‘text’ and ‘textual’ in this model is used in the broad sense, and does not only refer to the written word. It may refer to other tangible, cultural output, such as film, music, performance, costume, crafts and other artistic forms.

Fandom, Food and Folksonomies – and interdisciplinary research – at ASIS&T 2018

Posted on 25 November 2018 by Ludi Price

The Fandom, Food and Folksonomies panel at ASIS&T 2018 (courtesy of Eric Forcier).

Earlier this month, I was in Vancouver for the 2018 Annual ASIS&T meeting, to give a panel with some of my peers on research methodologies in fun-life contexts. The title of the panel was Fandom, Food and Folksonomies: The Methodological Realities of Studying Fun Life-Contexts – the conference proceedings can be viewed here. I was joined by the panel organiser, Melissa Ocepek, Julia Bullard, Sarah Polkinghorne, and Eric Forcier; the panel was moderated by the wonderful Jenna Hartel, whose work into Serious Leisure information behaviour has been a standard and inspiration for many of us working in the field.

The focus of my part of the panel was on research ethics, particularly interdisciplinary research ethics. As Carlin (2003) has noted, while LIS is a “net importer of research strategies […and] it could be assumed that research ethics would have been adopted, or formed the basis for debate” (Carlin 2003, p.5), there is still no overarching framework for interdisciplinary research ethics within LIS. In the particular case of my doctoral research (Price 2017), looking outside of LIS for an ethics framework was important, as the subject of my research (fan practice) has traditionally been, and to some extent still is today, considered deviant. Some fanworks/fan practices can be sexually explicit, or otherwise ‘pathological’, and therefore exposure can be damaging to fans. In addition to this, fanworks often exist in a legally grey area copyright-wise, which can expose fans to legal repercussions. As Busse and Hellekson (2012) have noted, fans share their work in ‘semi-private’ or ‘semi-public’ spaces, where they do not expect them to be scrutinised by outsiders, let alone academics. It is partially for this reason that fans may publish their work pseudonymously, in order to protect their identities.

For this reason, in my research I adopted the TWC’s ‘fans first’ framework, which protects fans’ rights to privacy despite their work being developed and published in semi-public spaces. This might not strictly satisfy academic standards with regards to, for example, citations (‘fans first’ does not promote using URL’s to identify the location of fanworks); but it does give fans a token layer of the expected privacy from non-fandom publics. From an academic perspective, the location would still be identifiable by those seeking to verify the information given by using modern online search methods.

The Fandom, Food and Folksonomies panel at ASIS&T 2018 (courtesy of Eric Forcier).

The point of my presentation was to make LIS scholars aware that, when researching fun-life contexts, the groups subject to that research may follow cultural norms that are particularly sensitive and should warrant special consideration. This may be the case in, for example, a study of the information behaviour of BDSM practitioners, queer communities, or of dark web usage. In these cases, there may already be an extensive body of literature in other disciplines that explore the ethics of researching such groups, and it would behove the LIS scholar to acquaint themselves in such literature before undertaking their research. This should allow for a more holistic and sensitive approach to engaging with communities that might be wary of or even hostile to academic enquiries into their (sub)-culture.

The panel itself was a success, not in the least due to the fantastic moderation of Jenna Hartel, the fascinating research presented by my co-panellists, and the discerning questions from the floor. Despite the panel taking place at 8:30am, there was a large audience, and after the panel we were all swamped by attendees interested in our work, which was hugely gratifying.

Afterwards there was plenty left of the day. After a short break I next wandered into the ‘Meet the Editors’ panel, and was interested to hear from Samuel Kai Wah Chu (incoming editor of the journal Information and Learning Science) about the importance of interdisciplinarity to his journal. His focus was on how information science and learning science intersects, and how we can bring scholars from other fields together. My opinion is that, since information permeates and impacts all our lives, information science is, necessarily, multi- or interdisciplinary. What it isn’t so good at is communicating to other disciplines with which its research overlaps, and so I was glad to hear that other scholars in the field are taking this question seriously.

I next went to the Knowledge and Information Organisation track. The first paper, delivered by Oksana Zavalina, presented research on the implementation of RDA standards in libraries worldwide, and over time, which I found particularly interesting, as my place of work is currently implementing RDA, or at least the bare minimum of the standard. Due to a lack of man-hours, we are unable to retroactively update old records, although we are doing so in an ad hoc and piecemeal manner – so it will indeed be interesting to the results of RDA uptake in a longitudinal study.

The second paper, Reconceptualizing Superwork for improved access of popular cultural objects, was of particular interest to me, as, of course, the organisation of fanworks (a type of popular cultural object) is a subject close to my heart. The presentation, delivered by Jacob Jett, was excellent, and gave much food for thought. Fanworks were not included as objects in the superwork hierarchy per se, although there was discussion of if and how they should fit in, and the authors indicated that they would be considering fanworks in future research. Julia Bullard and myself had an interesting back channel conversation about it on Twitter during the presentation (see below for the thread). My opinion is that fanworks are intrinsically tied to the superwork (or source text(s)), and would certainly appear in a hierarchical model under the superwork. The Archive of Our Own’s classification system, also hierarchical, is an excellent example of how fanworks relate to a superwork (see their Gundam page for an example).

Really wondering how fanworks fall into this idea of the ‘superwork’ #asist2018 #ASIST18

— Ludi Price 柏詠璇 (@LudiPrice) 13 November 2018

The final keynote, delivered by Zeynep Tufekci, was a fantastic end to the day, and very topical considering the ‘post-truth’ age we now live in. Zeynep’s talk focused on how we have evolved from information censorship to information ‘distraction’ – our current state of information glut is an effective way of distracting from ‘inconvenient’ information that the powers that be do not want us to see. Fake news and click bait has proved to be a far more effective and insidious form of censorship than censorship itself. The talk was inspiring and very pertinent to the responsibility we, as information professionals and scholars, bear in current times.

All in all, I had a fantastic time at ASIS&T, not only for the stimulating and inspiring content, but also for the fantastic people I talked to and shared research with. This was a great opportunity to connect with the wider LIS community, both intellectually and personally.

ASIS&T 2018 – achieving full rainbow!

REFERENCES

Busse, K., and Hellekson, K. (2012). Identity, ethics and fan privacy. In: K. Larsen and L. Zubernis (eds.). Fan Culture: Theory/Practice. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 38-56.
Carlin, A. P. (2003). Disciplinary debates and bases of interdisciplinary studies: the place of research ethics in library and information science. Library & Information Science Research, [online] 25, 3-18. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0740-8188(02)00163-9.
Price, L. (2017) Serious leisure in the digital world: exploring the information behaviour of fan communities. [pdf] Ph.D. City, University of London. Available at: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/19090/

Some notes on what LIS can learn from fan information behaviour

Posted on 9 October 2017 by Ludi Price

A couple of years back I gave a talk during #citymash entitled ‘NSFW: Fanfiction in the Library’, which was more or less an exploratory dive into how LIS can learn from fan information behaviour. (My original blog post on this event can be found here. You can also read the handout for the talk here).

Recently I found the notes I took from audience members during the talk, which were very helpful in helping formulate some of the theories later developed in my PhD thesis. I’ve decided to do a little rundown of these notes (plus some discussion), which might be of interest, particularly to those who are thinking about what LIS can learn from fan information practices (and that of other participatory cultures. Trust me – there is lots we can learn!).

So here we are – some comments from the audience

-oOo-

Fan information behaviour is fun.

The implication being that information behaviour in professional/academic/research/mundane contexts is not. Is this strictly true? If not, how can LIS make their systems fun for users to engage with? If yes, then what can we do to harness the pleasurable aspects of information behaviour that we are not already tapping into?

Tagging only makes sense to me.

One audience member thought that the only aspect of fan information behaviour that could be successfully incorporated into LIS systems is tagging. But free tagging has already been instituted on many online library, museum and gallery catalogues, with only limited success, and hasn’t seen the wide-ranging and innovative usage that manifests on platforms such as AO3 and Tumblr.

You need a feeling of community for it to work.

Users need to have a strong sense of community; they need to be invested in the institution and/or the thing that it stands for. Otherwise they will not be motivated to contribute to participatory classification activities (such as free tagging), or other initiatives that may be beneficial to institutional information work. Certain groups, such as scholars, amateur genealogists, historians, movie enthusiasts etc., already have the requisite investment in a certain domain – however the degree of their involvement in participatory information behaviour is variable, and whilst similar in some ways to fan information behaviour, is arguably less intense.

Publicity and discussion is needed to foster a sense of community and investment in collections.

Are there people who already have that vested interest in your collection? Who are passionate about it? Find those people and engage with them. What do they have to offer? What do they think are the best ways to publicise your collection and engage others with them?

AO3 is creating a collection of deleted fanworks.

Fans are very interested in preserving their cultural history and the artefacts associated with it. They are able to think outside the box and come together on a voluntary basis to preserve their fannish history. Maybe passionate users of memory institution collections have ideas about how works they are interested in can best be preserved, curated and showcased.

There’s a similarity between big name scholars and big name fans (BNF). The cliques that form around BNF and their influence can be toxic to the community. There can be gaming the system, such as getting fans of the BNF to increase hits, reviews and positive spin on their work.

The comment implies that scholarship suffers from the same sorts of problems, such as skewed metrics and citation practices.

Library systems could be more user-focused.

There is a trend towards this, with more ‘interactive’ functions, such as scrolling book covers, free-tagging affordances, and the ability to create reading lists – are these initiatives successful, and do they engender passionate, fan-like information behaviour? How can we make using the library catalogue ‘pleasurable’?

Friction is an issue – there is less friction for fans when using their information systems.

There is plenty of friction in fan information systems, but because fans are invested in the system (and sometimes because they actually own, develop or maintain the system), they are more motivated to create workarounds or improve that system. Perhaps information professionals can engage with users about friction points and how to overcome them.

MARC cataloguing – can it be used to catalogue fanworks?

MARC cataloguing standards are not readily transparent and there is a learning curve to using and understanding them. Most people outside of LIS have not heard of MARC or know of its purpose. Similarly, standards such as the Library of Congress subject headings are not granular enough to cater for the specificities of fandom. Therefore fans do not generally use these standards to catalogue their works – indeed, most fanworks have no standard bibliographical data applied to them. Is there a way that those standards can be mapped onto the cataloguing standards that have already been developed by the fan community?

Fan-tagging type systems already exist for ‘normal’ books.

These can be seen in many OPACs or online catalogues, although usage appears to be low. The tagging system on LibraryThing is much more widely used and successful, as the LibraryThing community has a vested interested in their own libraries (and, perhaps, books themselves). They can also contribute obscure information about books, including different editions, acquisition information, and even upload their own covers for books. There is a sense that they are contributing to the catalogue, and enriching the experiences of other LibraryThing users. This is not apparent in standard online catalogues.

-oOo-

So that’s it for the discussions that came out of my talk. Lots to think about. One thing that stuck out to be as I was going back on these was the point that I copied out in bold in the previous paragraph – “enriching the experiences of other LibraryThing users”. I believe this is of primary importance in building participatory information behaviours and systems. It isn’t merely a case of being personally invested in the collection, but also in the community around it. It is about improving, enriching, and sharing accurate and interesting knowledge about the collection with other users who share your passion. It is about contributing value to a community. It is even about sharing your own knowledge capital – I know a really rare fact about a limited edition of this book, and I want everyone else to know I know. I can reference a really obscure comic issue/TV episode in my fanfiction, and I’m going to tag it so everyone else can know I know about it. I live in the road where this photo in this archive was taken, so I’m going to share my personal knowledge of this road to enrich peoples’ knowledge of this place with my own.). Tapping into what users have to offer the entire community, and making them feel that their knowledge is valuable, is key to concepts of participatory engagement in information work.

My newborn fanfiction book collection

Posted on 23 June 2017 by Ludi Price

I recently decided to start a collection of fanfiction books.

This may seem like a bit of an oxymoron, especially nowadays when most fanfic is published online and most fans aren’t even aware it exists in book form. When you say ‘print fanfic’, most people think you mean fanzines. But I’m talking about books, actual fanfic printed in book format. I can’t say exactly what spurred on my sudden decision to collect fanfic books, especially when a good portion of its contents already exist online, and free. Maybe it’s just the bibliophile in me. Maybe it’s just the librarian in me. Maybe it’s just the collector in me. Maybe it’s just the fan. Most likely it’s all of the above.

I was first introduced to the idea of fanfic in book form in the mid-2000’s when my sister’s friend sent her a beautiful illustrated book of her fanfic (which I briefly mentioned a long time ago in a previous blog post). It looked so gorgeous, so professional, that the concept stuck in my mind, and a few years later I published my own fic in book form. This was more for my own benefit than anyone else’s. I just really wanted to hold my own words in my hands, to leaf through them, to annotate them, to put them on my book shelves just like the other treasured tomes I possess. It turned out that there were a small number of fans who also wanted copies, and so I opened up access to the books on Lulu.com

The first few books of my new collection…

It wasn’t until I started research on my Ph.D. that I discovered that the fanfiction book was more common than I first thought it was. I was doing a random search for my ship on Amazon when I discovered a certain book that I may also have mentioned in a previous blog post. I bought a copy (for research purposes initially), mainly because I was intrigued that this book of fanfic was being sold (presumably for money) on a major online bookstore, and had an ISBN (Lulu.com will make these books available at major bricks-and-mortar bookstores, such as Borders, in this case). I haven’t linked to this particular book, since I don’t want to risk drawing the attention of rights-holders to the author, due to the work’s legally grey area.

At the Fan Studies Network Conference last year, I was shown some gorgeous fanfic books, also printed by Lulu, by an acquaintance, and this again reminded me that ‘this was a thing’. At this point, I actually did a little bit of digging into the phenomena and discovered the notorious case of Lori Jareo’s Another Hope, a Star Wars fanfic book that was sold in major bookstores, and was finally shut down by Lucasfilm in 2006. At the time, it caused significant ripples in the fan community, who were afraid that the furore would cause a backlash from the Powers That Be against fanfic itself. Taking a look around the net, I was able to find that there was quite a sizeable amount of fanfic books out there, and since this seems to be a little-known area of fandom (and fandom research), I thought I would start up a collection of my own – for both research and entertainment purposes.

From a research perspective, there are three strands to my interest in collection fanfic books. The first centres around changing modes of publication. In the digital era, print-on-demand (POD) has meant that self-publishing has become an affordable reality for many, and there is no longer the stigma of publishing through a ‘vanity press’. This suggests that the internet has afforded yet more ways for fans to publish their work, apart from digital or amateur press avenues.

On the shelf…

The second area of interest revolves around the materiality of the book, and the fact that some fans still like to have their work presented in a physical format; and that others still like to buy physical written works, despite the free/gift culture that exists within the fan community. I suspect that this may have something to do with idea of collectability – that there exists in the fan the desire to possess physical tokens of their fandom, the collective size of which may bestow fan capital. This interest in owning physical works is especially interesting considering the recent decline in e-book sales. Could the phenomenon of fanfic books tell us something about why print books sales are once more increasing?

The last strand of interest for me is that old chestnut – copyright. Needless to say fanfic books occupy a grey area legally, and even if they are not being sold for profit (i.e. sales only going towards the cost of production and/or shipping), does this let them off the hook? Do they still constitute fair use? And what drives fans to sell print versions of their fanfiction despite the legal nightmare experienced by Another Hope over a decade ago?

I’m not expecting my collection to answer any of these questions. What it does make me think about however, is that fanfiction books occupy a unique place in the long history of print. One day, I hope, my collection will be the basis of a public institutional collection that can be enjoyed by all.

* I’m currently taking donations to my collection. If you’re interested in donating, please reply to this post, DM me at @ludiprice on Twitter, or email me at Ludovica.Price.1 (at) city.ac.uk. Thanks! 🙂

List of UK (fan)zine collections

Posted on 29 May 2017 by Ludi Price

This list is intended to be a resource to other UK (fan)zine researchers. It is by no means exhaustive and is a work-in-progress. Please contact me via the comment box below if there are any that are missing and that need to be added. It was originally drawn up for a paper/presentation, ‘Fan Fiction in the Library‘, delivered at the Fan Studies Network Conference 2016 (paper currently in press) with Lyn Robinson.

Major thanks to the zine collections list at http://zines.barnard.edu/zine-libraries#uk for the bulk of these links!

56a Zine Library, London, England. Political, feminist, queer, activist zines as well as perzines and punk zines.
British Library, London, England. Counterculture zines, women’s zines, riot grrrl zines,music zines, football zines, alternative comics.
Canny Little Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Punk zines, feminist zines, queer zines, perzines, political zines, and pamphlets.
Cowley Club, Brighton, England. Lending library with materials relating to libertarian, ecological, and feminist books, pamphlets, and zines.
Glasgow Women’s Library, Glasgow, Scotland. Feminist, perzines, music, punk, political, comics included in the collection. The collection dates from the early 90s to present day.
London College of Communication, London, England. Art zines as well as music/personal/political zines, covering art, music, photography, politics and personal stories; mostly 21^st century zines, oldest 1970’s, currently being added to). Also at https://www.facebook.com/LCCLibraryZineCollection
Manchester LGBT Zine Library, Manchester, England. Zines housed in the Joyce Layland LGBT Centre
Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, England. Was slated to open late 2016. No further news as yet. Currently taking donations.
Mobile Menstrual Zine Library, Sheffield, England. Reference only.
Poetry Library, London, England. Poetry zines, art zines, radical printing, fanzines, and perzines.
Salford Zine Library, Manchester, England. A self-publishing archive formed in January 2010 by Craig John Barr.
Stuart Hall Library, London, England. Cultural diversity, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, as well as personal/political/arts based zines.
Tate Library, London, England. Art zines (collage, illustration, and photography feature heavily), punk zines, fanzines, political and personal zines, comix, and poetry zines.
University for the Creative Arts, Epsom, England. The Public Zine Collection. Art zines, etc.
University of Liverpool Library special collections (includes fanzines in their science fiction collection).
University of Portsmouth/Zineopolis, Portsmouth, Hampshire. Zineopolis! Supports an arts, design & media illustration course
The Women’s Library, LSE, London, England.
York Zine Library, York, England. A small lending library of zines, indie press comics and DIY publications based at Travelling Man York.