![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ashkitty![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
ao3_news_feed
Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Julie Bozza, who volunteers as a Senior FSHP Volunteer and project manager for the Open Doors AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) for Open Doors.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
I first did a Five Things in March 2022, for my role as an Open Doors Administrative Volunteer. Back then, Open Doors’ main focus was on preserving fanworks from digital archives that were at risk of being lost. We had also established the Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP) which helps fans looking for a new home for their physical fannish artifacts to get in touch with interested collecting institutions, such as the University of Iowa Libraries.
Since then, I’m delighted to say that Open Doors partnered up with the fan-run preservation project Zinedom to create the AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP), which runs as part of FCPP.
The OTW is keenly interested in preserving and engaging with our shared fannish history, and making fanworks available to our community. I love the thought that someone might be browsing through Fanlore, or reading an issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, and get curious about a particular fanwork - maybe dating back to a zine published 50 years ago —and then be able to find the text and related artwork preserved on AO3.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
We have a number of fanzine publishers and individual creators who are already working with FSHP to import their fanworks to AO3. The import process can be quite lengthy, and has numerous steps, so a typical week might involve anything from exchanging emails with publishers or creators, to setting up a formal agreement with them, scanning fanzines and using OCR to convert the PDFs into editable text, proofreading the text, creating AO3 archivist accounts and collections, and so on… At some point we start the actual importing of works as well!
The Open Doors team has a few informal working meetings during the week, so I do my work then and keep an eye out for any FSHP-related questions. We have a large team of volunteers who help with the various tasks, along with their other OTW work, so all sorts of queries can arise.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I used to publish fanzines myself, starting in the late 1980s, and I wrote for and read other zines. As the decades-old badge on Fanlore’s Zine page announces, “FANZINES ARE FANDOM”. That was certainly the case for me, especially here in Australia, which can seem a long way from anywhere! There were wonderful events and conventions, and a group of Australian Buckaroo Banzai fans who would meet up for film screenings and Mongolian meals, but for me the heart of fandom was not only in the people but also in the creativity to be found in zines.
When the task came up of developing the idea of FSHP, writing up the necessary policies and processes, and getting the project underway, it made perfect sense to me that I would volunteer to help drive that.
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
We love spreadsheets in Open Doors, and couldn’t organise our imports of digital archives so well without them. But we knew that FSHP was going to be more complicated still, and we needed a database in order to manage a creator’s fanworks across a range of fanzines - and a publisher’s fanzine content across a range of creators - while dealing with different processes for word-based works and visual-based works.
It was a challenge—but an enjoyable one—to design and map a useful database, with helpful hints and tips from other OTW volunteers. And then to build it. And then to transfer across a whole lot of data from a number of spreadsheets that varied in content and organisation.
What can I say? I loved it! We’ve started using the FSHP Database for real now, and so far (luckily) the complaints have been minimal.
What fannish things do you like to do?
What I love most is writing, but alas I don’t do so much of that anymore. I love The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, and the related tv show, so re-reading and re-watching those is entertaining. Otherwise, Fandom is my fandom - and, now that I’m retired from the day job, I’m devoting many of my hours to supporting OTW’s work in the world. The only thing that could possibly be nicer than that would be for me to be writing again as well!
Meanwhile, if you are a reader, creator, or publisher of fanzines - and there is zine fic or art that you’d like to see preserved on AO3 - please do get in touch with Open Doors. We’d love to help!
Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out previous Five Things posts.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
ao3_news_feedIn October, we continued our internationalization efforts to make AO3's interface and emails translatable. We also worked on usability improvements to a variety of site features, including clarified buttons for posting and editing works, improved password reset messages and forms, and more consistent redirects when logging in or out. Alongside these updates, we overhauled exchange participants' Assignments pages and smoothed out other smaller issues across the site.
Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors Cole Kelling, Cubostar, John Pork, and Tani!
On October 1, we deployed improvements around password changes and resets. We also made some other small security fixes all around the site.
On October 3, we upgraded to Ruby 3.4 and it all went smoothly! Except that our release script skipped a version number again, but that's a very minor problem for a major upgrade.
On October 9, we overhauled the page where a user's challenge assignments are listed to make it easier to find incomplete assignments. We also fixed some style issues and did a lot of work for our ongoing project to internationalize the entire site!
On October 13, we changed the buttons for posting, previewing, and editing a work to have clearer names and behave more consistently. We also fixed a number of small bugs.
On October 17, we deployed a large refactoring of how we handle redirects back to pages that you came from, which made redirects after logging in and out much more reliable and also fixed some redirect-related 500 errors when accessing AO3 through alternative URLs.
On October 20, we made several internationalization-related email updates and released a variety of smaller fixes.
ao3_news_feed
AO3 Tag Wranglers continue to test processes for wrangling canonical additional tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete) which don't belong to any particular fandom (also known as "No Fandom" tags). This post will provide an overview of some of these upcoming changes.
In this round of updates, we continued a method which streamlines creation of new canonical tags, prioritizing more straightforward updates which would have less discussion compared to renaming current canonical tags or creating new canonical tags which touch on more complex topics. This method also reviews new tags on a regular basis, so check back on AO3 News for periodic "No Fandom" tag announcements.
None of these updates change the tags users have added to works. If a user-created tag is considered to have the same meaning as a new canonical, it will be made a synonym of one of these newly created canonical tags, and works with that user-created tag will appear when the canonical tag is selected.
In short, these changes only affect which tags appear in AO3's auto-complete and filters. You can and should continue to tag your works however you prefer.
The following concepts have been made new canonical tags:
While some of these tags may be tags and concepts with which you’re intimately familiar, others may be concepts you’ve never heard of before. Fortunately, our fellow OTW volunteers over at Fanlore may be able to help! As you may have seen in the comments sections of previous posts, Fanlore is a fantastic resource for learning more about these common fandom concepts, and about the history and lore of fandom in general. For the curious, here’s a quick look at a few articles about concepts related to this month’s new canonical tags:
While we won't be announcing every change we make to No Fandom canonical tags, you can expect similar updates in the future on the tags we believe will most affect users. If you're interested in the changes we'll be making, you can continue to check AO3 News or follow us on Bluesky @wranglers.archiveofourown.org or Tumblr @ao3org for future announcements.
You can also read previous updates on "No Fandom" tags as well as other wrangling updates, linked below:
For more information about AO3's tag system, check out our Tags FAQ.
In addition to providing technical help, AO3 Support also handles requests related to how tags are sorted and connected. If you have questions about specific tags, which were first used over a month ago and are unrelated to any of the new canonical tags listed above, please contact Support instead of leaving a comment on this post.
We do ask, however, that requesters keep in mind that discussions about what tags to canonize and what format they should take are ongoing. As a result, not all related concepts will be canonized at the same time. This does not mean that related or similar concepts will not be canonized in the future or that we have chosen to canonize one specific concept in lieu of another, simply that we likely either haven’t gotten to that related concept yet or that it needs further discussion and will take a bit longer for us to canonize it as a result. We appreciate your patience and understanding.
Lastly, we're still working on implementing changes and connecting relevant user-created tags to these new canonicals, so it’ll be some time before these updates are complete. If you have questions about specific tags which should be connected to these new canonicals, please refrain from contacting Support about them until at least two months from now to give us adequate time to do so.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
ao3_news_feed
The AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is a partnership between the Open Doors committee and fan-run preservation project Zinedom through which fanfiction and fanart originally published in print fanzines is imported to the Archive of Our Own. Fanworks can be imported to AO3 with the consent of either the creators of the works or the publisher of the fanzine in which the fanworks were published.
Today, Open Doors is pleased to announce a list of collections that it has created since September 2024 to house fanworks imported through the FSHP. A collection has been created for each fanzine from which one or more fanworks have been imported, but these collections do not contain every work from each of these zines, and many so far only include one work each in cases where Open Doors only has permission to import that particular work. For full transparency, Open Doors plans to continue to announce collections as they are created that may or may not grow with additional fanworks as additional permissions are obtained from more creators in the future.
As of August 2025, Open Doors has created the following collections to represent fanzines from which it has imported works:
For answers to frequently asked questions, please see the FSHP page on the Open Doors website. If you'd like to give Open Doors permission to import any of your fanworks that have been previously published in print fanzines, or if you have any other FSHP-related queries, please contact the Open Doors Committee.
We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of any fanzines in which they may have been published on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.
Thanks for your interest in preserving fannish history for future generations of readers!
- The Open Doors team
Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
ashkitty - Update on the family health stuffxkcd_feed - Repair Videoao3_news_feed - Five Things Julie Bozza Saidao3_news_feed - Releases 0.9.433 - 0.9.439: Change Logxkcd_feed - Heart Mountainao3_news_feed - Updates to "No Fandom" Additional Tags, October 2025xkcd_feed - Airspeedxkcd_feed - Document Forgeryao3_news_feed - Open Doors Announces New Import of Fanzine Worksxkcd_feed - Continentsxkcd_feed - Shielding Chartninetydegrees
