Archive of Our Own

Submission 20,166

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About

Archive of Our Own or AO3 is a popular nonprofit open source database for fanfiction and other fanworks contributed by users created by the Organization for Transformative Works in 2008. The site is known as one of the most popular fan fiction repositories due to its elaborate tagging system, overall organization and administrative involvement by fan fiction writers and readers.

History

In 2008, Archive of Our Own was founded in part by Naomi Novik who responded to FanLib's^[5] "lack of interest in fostering a fannish community and called for the creation of 'An Archive of One's Own"[…] inspired by the essay 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf."^[2] Co-founders Francesca Coppa, Naomi Novik and Rebecca Tushnet worked with the Organization for Transformative Works creating creating the archive in October 2008 and establishing the site as an open beta on November 14, 2009.

Features

The AO3 archive features an array of tags, content warnings and categories as well as the ability to perform an advanced search on all submitted works. Kudos are akin to "likes" and are awarded to authors by members of the AO3 community.

Highlights

On May 1st 2013, Time Magazine^[9] named Archive of Our Own as on of the 50 best websites of 2013 calling the site "the most carefully curated, sanely organized, easily browsable and searchable nonprofit collection of fan fiction on the Web."

On July 15, 2013, The Daily Dot^[3] reported on One Tumblr user, DestinationToast,^[8] who had been gathering statistics regarding the site. Some charts were created regarding top categories and content warnings (shown below).

On June 18th, 2015, Katharine Trendacosta on Gizmodo reported on a similar research project by Tumblr user Touka-Tokyo^[4] used the site’s “kudos” system to find that the most popular piece on AO3 was “I Am Groot” by sherlocksmyth.^[7]

Hugo Award

On August 18th, 2019, Archive of Our Own^[6] announced that they won the 2019 Hugo Award in the category of Best Related Work. Naomi Novik's acceptance speech was published on AO3 that same day:

"All fanwork, from fanfic to vids to fanart to podfic, centers the idea that art happens not in isolation but in community. And that is true of the AO3 itself. We’re up here accepting, but only on behalf of literally thousands of volunteers and millions of users, all of whom have come together and built this thriving home for fandom, a nonprofit and non-commercial community space built entirely by volunteer labor and user donations, on the principle that we needed a place of our own that was not out to exploit its users but to serve them.
Even if I listed every founder, every builder, every tireless support staff member and translator and tag wrangler, if I named every last donor, all our hard work and contributions would mean nothing without the work of the fan creators who share their work freely with other fans, and the fans who read their stories and view their art and comment and share bookmarks and give kudos to encourage them and nourish the community in their turn.

This Hugo will be joining the traveling exhibition that goes to each Worldcon, because it belongs to all of us. I would like to ask that we raise the lights and for all of you who feel a part of our community stand up for a moment and share in this with us."

Resignation of OTW Directors

As of July 27th, 2023, 3 out of 5 of the current OTW Board of Directors (who run Archive of Our Own) have resigned^[10]. The specific details surrounding the resignations of former directors Antonius Melisse, Natalia Gruber and Alex Tischer are unclear at the moment, but the news worried people that utilize the website to create or read fanwork content. For example, on July 27th, Twitter^[11] user @topgallantry explained how the resignations would impact the website "The OTW will be fine even if the board is completely overhauled, as it was once before, in 2015." The tweet (shown below) garnered over 208 likes and 80 retweets in a week.

On July 28th, 2023, Redditor^[12] u/EchoEkhi gave a full summary of the events, which included past allegedly racist comments from former board member Alex Tischer. The post (shown below) garnered over 60 upvotes in a week.

Traffic

On February 15, 2014, AO3^[1] announced that they had just reached over one million works on the site and over 14,300 fandoms. As of August 2019, Archive of Our Own boasts over five billion works, two million users and 33,000 fandoms.