#michael shoolbred

One of the earliest paper on the information behaviour of fans points to the ephemerality of fanworks as why librarians are (yet) uninterested in cataloging them.

The do-it yourself image of this information has also been a factor contributing to its being regarded as ephemeral and not important or a subject for serious consideration.

Hart, Chris, Michael Shoolbred, David Butcher, and David Kane. 1999. “The Bibliographical Structure of Fan Information.” Collection Building 18 (2): 81–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01604959910265869.

That fanworks are ephemeral could and will be argued – first maybe by the fanbinders among other fans and aca-fans (I personally think that when we send out another golden disc of human culture to aliens, it should at least include My Immortal).

Coker, Catherine. 2017. “The Margins of Print? Fan Fiction as Book History.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2017.1053.

Buchsbaum, Shira Belén. 2022. “Binding Fan Fiction and Reexamining Book Production Models.” In “Fandom Histories,” edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby Waysdorf, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 37. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2129.

Jacobs, Naomi, and JSA Lowe. 2024. “The Design of Printed Fan Fiction.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 43. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2547.

Kennedy, Kimberly. 2022. “Fan Binding as a Method of Fan Work Preservation.” In “Fandom Histories,” edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl and Abby S. Waysdorf, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 37. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2022.2107.

But let us entertain this premise just for now, to reveal what other reasons we could have for the preservation for fanworks.

Since we have been discussing fannish taxonomies in earlier posts, too, it must be clear that fans themselves will work to preserve fanworks. Even if we were not interested in fanworks themselves, the practices which are already in use are certainly relevant to information science.

Additionally, fandom signifiers are famously hard to decipher if removed from their primary context. Without detailed work dedicated to preserving this context as intact as possible, the aliens would have a hard time understanding the adventures of Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way.

Dym, Brianna, and Casey Fiesler. 2020. “Ethical and Privacy Considerations for Research Using Online Fandom Data.” In “Fan Studies Methodologies,” edited by Julia E. Largent, Milena Popova, and Elise Vist, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 33. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1733.

So what are some other reasons preserving and categorising fanworks can be important?