Every year, tens of thousands of fan-written stories, artworks, and videos vanish from the internet because no library is systematically preserving them. This PhD project investigates why fan-generated content—from sprawling novel-length fanfictions to digital art—is almost entirely absent from the UK’s national collections, despite being a major form of contemporary creative output. The core problem is a mismatch between how fan communities archive their own work (through volunteer-run platforms like Archive of Our Own, personal hard drives, and rescue missions for dying websites) and how legal deposit libraries collect published material. Since 2013, UK law requires libraries to capture web-based publications, but the ethics of sweeping up fan content without community consent remain unresolved. This research will compare fan archiving practices with institutional methods, then build an ethical and legal framework for collecting online fanworks. If successful, the findings could reshape how the British Library and other national institutions handle born-digital community content—not just fanworks, but any user-generated material at risk of loss. The project will also produce a curated web archive as a practical demonstration of how to collect complex digital publications responsibly, potentially influencing collection policies across the UK’s legal deposit libraries.
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This project will explore the publication, collection and preservation activities of online fan communities and fan archives. It will investigate the methodologies and practices utilised by fan communities in creating and archiving fanworks, how these differ from current practices in national libraries, and what can be learned to aid the collection management of relevant works. Online fan-generated content is at high risk of loss due to technical, legal and geographical constraints. Resultantly, fan fiction and other fan publications are poorly represented in national library collections. Fan content is not just made by and for fans, but often also archived by fans themselves. This is done through personal archives, volunteer-run initiatives, and rescue-mission-style archiving of disappearing domains or software (such as the archival work done by Archive of Our Own with the Open Doors project). This studentship will research archival practices within fan communities and compare them to those deployed in libraries, utilising methods that seek to understand the people behind the collections. It will inform best practices for the inclusion of fan communities within collecting activity, including a legal and ethical framework, and consider how institutions can refine their collection methodologies to accommodate newer formats and content types. As part of this CDP, the student will be supported in documenting their research in the form of a curated web archive collection, alongside a more traditional PhD dissertation. This will provide an opportunity to develop a contemporary collection of complex digital publications and document innovative use of technology in the UK publishing field. This CDP builds on the British Library’s work on collecting and preserving born-digital complex publications as part of UK legal deposit. Legal deposit, underpinned by regulations that mandate the systematic preservation of a nation’s published output, is generally considered a public good and the foundation of a comprehensive national collection. In recent years, scholars have investigated the use and users of legal deposit collections (e.g. Gooding, Terras and Berube, 2019). However, since the introduction of the Non-Print Legal Deposit regulations in 2013, extending the legal deposit mandate to items “transmitted by electronic means,” an under-investigated tension exists between the responsibility of legal deposit libraries to capture web-based formats, and the ethics of engaging with the source communities that produce and share content online. This CDP will address this tension, by exploring both decentralised collection systems and institutional policy/practices, as well as build relationships with online communities and the collections they are curating. It will answer the following key research questions: 1.) What are the information practices, needs and perspectives of fan communities engaged in preserving fanworks? 2.) What existing practices and ethical approaches do the UK legal deposit libraries apply to collecting complex web-based objects? 3.) How might these practices inform an ethical framework specific to the collecting of online fan-generated content? This PhD will actively support the British Library in fulfilling its mandate to collect as comprehensively as possible across the UK landscape. The findings will make a significant contribution to the field of Library and Archive Studies by deepening our understanding of the relationship between fandom identities and fanwork preservation practices, and help the British Library and other collecting institutions to develop ethical practices for collecting online fan-generated content in ways that are mutually beneficial to the institution as well as to the fandom community.
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