Oh, boy. I’ve jumped in with both feet now.
Yesterday, when Keri announced that it’s official — Angelfire and Tripod are shutting their sites down permanently — I sent the following announcement to three of the SMK groups on Facebook. I also copied it to my own page:
All right folks. I’d been thinking about this anyway, but the news about Angelfire/Tripod sites going down is pushing me into action. I’m going to start a Scarecrow and Mrs. King Archive over on AO3.
(To be clear: I am perfectly fine if someone who is not me does the same thing over on FFN or somewhere else. The more, the merrier.)
I’m giving this archive an alternate identity (not tied to mine) so that it can be handed off in the future. I’m waiting on the invite now and they are estimating April 5th for receipt. In the meantime, here are the parameters:
(1) This is not meant to be another Blue Boxers, SMK-Fic, etc. The primary mission is to preserve older SMK fics that are in danger of being lost forever.
(2) I would VERY, VERY strongly prefer to have an author’s permission to post. However, I’ll go ahead without it if there is evidence that the author can’t be contacted. In other words, if you send me a fic and you’re not the author — please let me know what you’ve done to try and contact them. [Yes, I’m going to maintain records.]
(3) I’m not curating. Any fic, as long as it’s SMK related and not already posted to AO3 or FFN, is eligible.
(4) Fics can be emailed to […] — this email address is already live and working, so feel free to start emailing. Just know that it’ll be a week or two before I’m able to start posting.
More to come…
Boy howdy did that ever get some response. A lot of “likes” and “thank yous” showed up, but I also got my first request not to post.
I’m going to have an official policy of honoring such requests, which means that I needed to go on and start capturing information even though I don’t have the AO3 invite yet. By the end of yesterday, I had a public folder going on Google Drive where folks can “peek behind the curtain” to see what I’m doing — and that do-not-post request is captured.
The idea is that, if need be, I’ll have an infrastructure set up where I can pass this archive off easily to anyone else who’s comfortable with AO3. All I’ll need to do is change permissions on the Drive folder and update the contact email address wherever it’s listed.
Today, during a lull at the paid job, I started downloading web pages off of the first Angelfire site I had (Dix’s). I first downloaded the entire page locally, and then second converted it to Microsoft Word in a format that I know will copy cleanly to AO3. And it took me a bit of time…
This is going to be a huge project. I just hope I haven’t inadvertently bitten off more than I can chew.