black and white and read only in specific fan circles

[xparrot]

OTW announced the preliminary stages of an archived zine collection: The Fan Culture Preservation Project. To me this sounds incredibly awesome - it's not a zine lending library (which I'd really love) but it's a chance for older zines to survive for future fans. Considering my current beloved MUNCLE has some 40 years of fic, but the vast majority of it is only available in zines, and the earliest of that has pretty much vanished without a trace...yeah, awesome!

Reading the comments on the posts, however, it seems like a few ziners (er, if that's the term?) are really distressed by the project's existence. Some of it is legal concerns - worry about authors being targeted for copyright violation, especially as a lot of zine authors published under their real names. While I think such concerns are far-fetched (especially given the nature of the collection; I worked in a university library special collections department for a few years, they're not exactly high-traffic areas), I can understand why it might worry folks, in our litigious age.

But more than that, it seems like some ziners are perturbed by the thought that scholars and non-fans might be able to read their zines. Or that people in general might be able to read them (with a fair bit of effort; they're not going to be online or anything, at least not without authorial permission, and I trust OTW to remain faithful to that.) The thought that they'd be theoretically accessible to anybody, even a non-fan, is upsetting to the point of making these people never want to make another zine.

And I admit...this baffles me. I can't understand this viewpoint at all. Then again, I have a hard time understanding people who pull all their fanfic from the web just because they're tired of a fandom. If one is worried about legal issues, that's one thing; and if you're actually being harassed for writing slash or something, I guess I can see it. And if you don't want feedback, positive or negative, if you're tired of talking or thinking about a story, fine. But that you just don't want your stories being read, by people who want to read them...I don't get it. It doesn't make sense to me.

I'm guilty of putting the reader's rights above the author's, I guess. It horrifies me that a story could be lost, merely because the author doesn't like it anymore. Cut ties with it, fine; post it anonymously, deny you ever wrote it, sure, that's your choice. But to erase it, delete it, make disappear a work of art that someone enjoyed, that someone remembered, that made someone think or feel, so that they can never re-experience it, or share it with anyone else - that upsets me. It feels like censorship, even if it's the artist's own; like a fundamental denial of what art is. Like it's a crime, a sin, to murder a story, even if you're its creator; like a story's right to exist trumps anyone's wish for it to be gone. That art is forgotten is inevitable, but that it is lost because it was deliberately buried, deliberately hidden - that's tragedy.

Which is why things like OTW excite me so, because they're fighting against that loss. And it's such a strong feeling in me that I get really, really tempted to say damn the fans who disagree, because they're wrong.

(It occurs to me that this emotional response is probably as extreme as that of those fans who do vehemently disagree; they likely think I'm just as fundamentally wrong. But it's awfully difficult for me to see it their way; even if intellectually I sort of understand a creator's right to control access to their work, emotionally my convictions are hard to shift. I just can't grok it.)

(I also admit there's a lot of selfishness in my way of thinking - there's MUNCLE fic out there that I want to read, damn it! What do I care if the authors like their stories anymore - I'll enjoy them, and that's what matters! XP)

ETA: Though I was responding to a few dissenting voices on the OTW blog, francescacoppa explains in comments here that the majority of zine fans in the OTW, or who the OTW has heard from, are in favor of the archive project. Most of us do want these things preserved, and shared, and I can't say how happy I am to hear this. It does match with my previous experience with old school fans; in the various older fandoms I've been in, the established fans have usually been welcoming and very ready to share the wealth of years of fanning with crazy new fans, to my gratitude and delight.

ETA2: I was linked on metafandom, it seems. Erm. With all my raving about freedom of information, I really ought to be able to remember that other people beyond my circle of friends might come read my idiocies. Anyway, welcome. I do have one request: if you are going to post anonymous replies, please sign them - you don't have to use your actual name or handle; Anonymous X-Y-Z is fine, but if there are different anonymouses posting, I'd like to be able to keep them straight.

Comments

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is wonderful to hear - I'd heard there was some upset in other communities as well, but to know that the archive has the blessing of the majority of fans is fantastic. (even the comments on OTW weren't as bitter or angry as they could have been; I think some people weren't totally clear on the project...)

...and completely selfishly, I'm hoping such support will carry over into granting permission for digitalization as well; Iowa's a long ways from here, but I'd love to be able to read older stories!

[francescacoppa.livejournal.com]

I do think there was some (right and reasonable) concern over digitization, and yes, there are a few fans who don't ever want their work collected ever. But I'd say that the response was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, this project wasn't so much something OTW innovated as our response to a problem brought to us by many (particularly older) zine fans who really don't know what to do with their zines and may not have the physical or economic ability to deal with them alone. One of the reasons we went with Iowa, FWIW, rather than other (awesome) libraries like UC Riverside (which also has a great zine collection) is that Iowa was willing to work with OTW to provide postage, arrange UPS pickups, to provide boxes as well as, in some cases, fan labor to help older fans who otherwise couldn't afford to (or aren't well enough to) orchestrate the mailing of boxes of zines to a library. We really just tried to be a liaison to help those fans who DO want to preserve their collections.

Vis a vis digitization, yes, we obviously want that too (as do many of our donors: Ming Wathne of the Fanzine Archive was hoping that we could continue their heritage as a lending library, which sadly, we don't have the resources for), and we're going to have our legal people looking in to clearing things for scanning. But we do get that a) privacy expectations were different for older zines and b) many zine editors were really explicit about copying and copyright, and we respect that just the way we would with any in-print, copyrighted book. So as I've been explaining, we're really treating zines the same as any other work: you don't need permission to donate a copy of a published volume to a library, but you do require permission or clearance to digitize or post that work on the web.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

there are a few fans who don't ever want their work collected ever.

Out of curiosity, are there any potential steps that could be taken such that these ziners who really want nothing to do with the project wouldn't be archived? A no-call list, basically? (or ideally, that they would be archived but inaccessible to the public?) I don't think it would entirely satisfy those who'd rather opt-in than opt-out, but it might alleviate some concerns? And hopefully, from what you're saying, it wouldn't be a long list.

[francescacoppa.livejournal.com]

On the scale we're talking, it would be very very difficult--just cataloging this stuff is hard enough!--but I also have to say that I'm (personally) kind of against it on principle, the way I'm against indulging pro authors who don't want fanfiction written about their work. (I say personally because we haven't formally discussed this in OTW). But I'm not sure I'm sure I'm prepared to abridge the fair use rights of libraries because fans don't want people to have the right to quote, excerpt, etc. It seems dangerous to public discourse from another direction, if you see what I mean.

[copracat]

Would it be possible to 'orphan' zines for the purpose of digitizing zines where the fan writer's only objection is connection to their name? I can understand fans not wanting their government names attached to fanworks on a search engine scale thirty or forty years after the original publication to a closed community.

Hmm. Probably too big a question for right now.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

At least right now, names entering search engines aren't a concern - the public listing for the zines will only have the fandom name and story title, not any author's names. The only way to find an author's name would be to look up the hardcopy zine itself.

As far as digitizing goes, probably they'll cross that bridge when they come to it?

Archiving is NOT digitizing!

[francescacoppa.livejournal.com]

Hang on, hang on--*digitizing*, something else *entirely*, IS dependent on permissions (at least during the term of copyright!) If you check out the FAQ, you'll see that we are very sensitive to the *digital* issue even above and beyond this, because fans often wrote under names that they never imagined would be googlable. That's different than *archiving* the zine, which is a matter of *storing* it in the space of the library and making exerpts available by snail mail photocopy.

Put another way: it's no different than what you would do with a contemporary best seller by a living author. I can donate my copy of Harlan Ellison's short stories to a library without the author's permission. I can go to the library and make some photocopies of selected bits without permission. If I couldn't get to the library, I could ask a librarian to copy these same bits for me and mail them (that's an accessibility issue, serving the public beyond Iowa). I could NOT scan or put the book online without author, editor, or publisher permission.

Hope that helps!

Re: Archiving is NOT digitizing!

[copracat]

Yes, English is the language I speak and those are issues I understand.

Sorry, I'm in pain and annoyed by other things which led to me responding more sharply than I otherwise would, particularly considering I'm aware you've been dealing with very grumpy people with great grace and calm for several days now.

Re: Archiving is NOT digitizing!

[francescacoppa.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry if my reply sounded condescending--I didn't mean it to! I was just trying to be emphatic, because the distinction is *crucial*. There's a world of difference between storing zines at a university for posterity and allowing fans, scholars, and interested people to get small excerpts by snail mail by request...and having your RL name come up as the author of "Spock's Asscheeks," in Beyond Your Wildest Dreams Ever, Issue #99 through a google search. *g* I am very strongly committed to the former and have been working really hard to get the message out that fans don't have to worry about the latter, that OTW's thought about that!

So I'm not even so much replying to you as to the people who might see my comment here, you know?

Re: Archiving is NOT digitizing!

[cschick.livejournal.com]

I could ask a librarian to copy these same bits for me and mail them (that's an accessibility issue, serving the public beyond Iowa). I could NOT scan or put the book online without author, editor, or publisher permission.

Well, there is also the fact that most modern photocopiers do digitize as part of the copying process and temporarily store those copies locally. :P

I'm just curious, though, having worked in the ILL (Inter-Library Loan) department at Northwestern for several years back at the end of the 1990s . . . has ILL switched back to photocopy+snail mail? In the 1990s, we had a gigantic machine that digitized and e-mailed or faxed ILL requests for articles and the like. We barely did any photocopy and snail mail any more ten+ years ago. I spent far too many hours of my life in front of that machine . . .

Re: Archiving is NOT digitizing!

[francescacoppa.livejournal.com]

AFAIK its photocopies, but I can inquire. It may be because its "special collections" rather than regular collections; manuscripts, etc.

That being said, the larger idea is that OTW/Iowa isn't going to be making material available online/googlable without some sort of clearance, and that that extends even to author names (which typically is fair information to disseminate.) (I mean, any reader could scan a zine they owned and put it online, but they wouldn't have permission--or the right--to do so.)

Re: Archiving is NOT digitizing!

[cschick.livejournal.com]

I know we even did this with some special collections works--mainly because I and my boss were the only ones trained to handle the allowed special collection works on the machine. Most of what in special collections couldn't be scanned simply because it was too fragile to be handled as required. But then again, much of what was in NW's special collections was pre-1926, so there wasn't even any copyright concerns about scanning it . . . just about not destroying it.

I'm more curious from a whole legal standpoint than anything else: back in 1995/1996, when I worked ILL, we were really operating without guides to what was proper and allowed. Libraries operate in a strange mindspace . . . part of which is forever pushing at the bounds of the restrictions of copyright while trying to respect those bounds as well. I could see methods having gone BACK to the more primitive since I worked there, simply because of the threat of lawsuits from using the more modern.

I wouldn't necessarily say that these things aren't going to be digitalized, unless you have very strong guarantees that they will not be, because there is a lot of internal digitization for preservation purposes going on quietly within libraries. But those digitalization projects DO try to respect the concept of hard-copy archiving: what is the difference between a librarian accessing a private filestore and printing off pages 3-10 in manuscript A, than the librarian grabbing manuscript A off the stacks and photocopying it? The difference there is that manuscript A isn't being abused each time it's required.

The risk there is what happens should that private filestore "escape" the bounds set on it, or when content within that filestore reaches the end of copyright itself.

Re: Archiving is NOT digitizing!

[francescacoppa.livejournal.com]

Right, I see what you mean. I think that after copyright expires, bets are off--though right now, that's more than 100 years off for most people. And I do think that libraries--in general, not in terms of this collection per se--are considering darknet and/or password protected kinds of solutions for dealing with digital files. But I do think that the rules are pretty clear about not making things "public"--(for some definition of public)--and that any file can "escape" the bounds at any time. Like I said, hypothetically, any owner of a zine could scan it and put it online, and the author/editor would have to get them to take it down (but the author/editor WOULD have the law on their side and be able to go to the ISP etc.)