The new archive phenomenon.

[icarus]

Is this happening to other people?

I've had requests to archive my stories - which is great, I love it, I always say yes.

But lately people have been sending me these forms to fill out with all the information for the fics they want. They even want me to fill out a separate form for each fic they dictate. This is starting to seem a little lazy. When wicked_elf wanted my fics, The Elf did the work. switchknife, same deal.

Maybe this is churlish, but I'm a little pressed for time these days and haven't the patience to do this for everyone, as grateful as I am for the request. I've had three in the last week and a half. It just seems a bit rude or demanding or somesuch.

Comments

[wickedelf.livejournal.com]

I'm not objective obviously, but I think it's a bit rude. As an archivist it seems like if you want the story, you do the work. Are they asking you to actually send them an html copy of the story, or are they asking for the header info?

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

"...can you please fill out the info for each so I can archive it?

Author Name:
Email Address:
Title:
Genre:
Pairings (If any):
Spoilers From the Books (If any):
Rating:
Summary:"

I've had three people in the last week and a half send me something like this. It sort of makes you feel like... you don't know this, then how can you know if you like the story?

[tinderblast.livejournal.com]

Just to play devil's advocate, part of me can see this request as being conscientious and making sure that the information submitted at the site is entirely correct and up-to-date. You might have changed things since the first publication of the story, particularly the summary and e-mail address. With at least two of your stories as well, I can think of why the stated pairing is an important for YOU to decide ;)

-brodie

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Hmm. It's a good thought, good reason to do it. But usually people with such good intentions say so. Most of the requests I've had like this have sounded... hmm... a bit immature in the rest of the message. So I suspect simple thoughtlessness.

Icarus

[tinderblast.livejournal.com]

That's a shame. It's probably just thoughtlessness, or is fatigue/panic setting in when they realised how much work an archive is. Or they just don't understand fandom etiquette.

Look at me, making excuses for them. I'm always accused of backing the underdog. I guess I just don't know much about what constitutes good archiving policies.

Speaking of fandom issues, I've been wondering lately about statistics - I started a thread at my LJ about it - and I'd be curious about what you think. Now that you have time to post ;)

I was at skyehawke looking at the 'popular stories' and the ratio of number of hits a story received to the number of reviwes received was staggeringly bad. No other sites, to the best of my knowledge, offer these kind of stats, and I was really shocked. Like over a thousand hits, anf five responses. There's a number of qualifying factors, I know, but surely there's something wrong with that level of non-feedbacking.

-brodie

[wickedelf.livejournal.com]

That's bizarre. I mean, it's not like you don't usually have that info easily available with the story when you read it (to decide if you want to archive it) anyway. I've contacted a few people about summaries if they don't do one and I can't think of a good one, or if they change their summary every chapter - I'll ask them for what they'd consider an overall summary of the story itself to be.

Lazy buggers.