When people talk about OTW's Open Doors committee, it's often about their efforts to sustain and preserve fansites. These can be put at risk by any number of things. Open Doors does the slow, careful work of importing other fan archives onto AO3 so the works they hold will not be lost to future fans.

But Open Doors has another project which people may not know about: the Fan Culture Preservation Project (FCPP). FCPP is a joint venture with the University of Iowa to archive physical items from fan history such as 'zines, flyers, fanvids, t-shirts and other fan-made ephemera.

Although part of the University's Special Collections, the FCPP is open to the public. Any fan who visits the library can view the collections without needing special permission. All you need is a desire to learn more about the history of fan culture, a willingness to follow the library's rules, and some time to spend curled up in the library.

Hi, 852 Prospect authors!

The 852 Prospect is still moving to the AO3 due to the state of its software (read more about this in our first post about the move), but there have been some unexpected delays with the code needed to do the automated import happen. For that reason, the Open Doors Committee will be emailing AO3 invitations (and explanations) to all of the 852 Prospect authors in the next few weeks. This will allow any interested author to set up their own accounts and import their stories to the 852 Prospect collection on AO3 if they don't want to wait. If you no longer have access to the email address you used on 852Prospect.org, or if you have questions not answered by this post, you can always contact Open Doors. (If you have verified your new address with Open Doors before, you don't need to do so again.)