at a conference I attended recently, a researcher pointed to the difficulty of finding material in archives because so much depends on the metadata and the terminology used to describe things changes over time. "it would be so helpful," the researcher said, "if I typed 'lesbian' into the library of congress database, it would also show me results that were categorised in the 50s, when the materials were interpreted as 'intimate female friendships'"
which is what tag wrangles at Archive Of Our Own do incredibly effectively: searching for "omegaverse" also leads to "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "alternate universe: a/b/o" and so on. but ao3 achieves this frankly incredible categorisation and indexing system by the power of countless volunteers putting in hours and hours of unpaid and unthanked free time, and it's completely understandable that most archives do not have that kind of infrastructure, but also how incredible that a fan-run website has better searchability, classification, and accessibility than the library of congress
“When I tweeted about AO3's tags a while back, I received many comments from people wishing that their professional tagging systems were as good, including users of news sites, library catalogs, commercial sales websites, customer help-desk websites, and PubMed (the most prominent database of medical research).”
— Gretchen McCulloch of @lingthusiasm, “Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online”
It's crazy to think that AO3 has such a complex and respected tag system. Bless the volunteers of that site for their maintenance, cause IDK how it would be done otherwise.
