Fan Futures—Beyond the Archive: Papers from the FanLIS 2022 Symposium

Following the first successful FanLIS symposium (Price & Robinson, 2022), our aim in 2022 was to continue to build bridges between the two fields, doing this through two streams held over the two-day event—the first stream being ‘Beyond the Archive’, and the second ‘Fan Futures’. ‘Beyond the Archive’ focused on the ways in which fans move beyond traditional relationships with the archive to subvert, use and perhaps even abuse the archive to create and innovate. ‘Fan Futures’ then zoomed out from the archive to consider different aspects of the information communication chain—creation, organisation, dissemination, discovery, management, preservation, analysis, use and understanding—traditional domains of concern to LIS—and how fan practice is changing and innovating in those areas

Library Carpentry: software skills training for library professionals

Librarians play a crucial role in cultivating world-class research and in most disciplinary areas today world-class research relies on the use of software. This paper describes Library Carpentry, an introductory software skills training programme with a focus on the needs and requirements of library and information professionals. Using Library Carpentry as a case study of the development and delivery of software skills focused professional development, this paper describes the institutional and intellectual contexts in which Library Carpentry was conceived, the syllabus used for the initial exploratory programme, the administrative apparatus through which the programme was delivered, and the analysis of data collection exercises conducted during the programme. As many university librarians already have substantial expertise working with data, it argues that adding software skills (that is, coding and data manipulation that goes beyond the use of familiar office suites) to their armoury is an effective and important use of professional development resource

"Being in a Knowledge Space": information behaviour of cult media fan communities

This article describes the first two parts of a three-stage study investigating the information behaviour of fans and fan communities, focusing on fans of cult media. A literature analysis shows that information practices are an inherent and major part of fan activities, and that fans are practitioners of new forms of information consumption and production, showing sophisticated activities of information organisation and dissemination. A subsequent Delphi study, taking the novel form of a 'serious leisure' Delphi, in which the participants are not experts in the usual sense, identifies three aspects of fan information behaviour of particular interest beyond the fan context: information gatekeeping; classifying and tagging; and entrepreneurship and economic activity

Building bridges: Papers from the FanLIS 2021 symposium

This editorial gives background and context on FanLIS, a symposium series and research project run by CityLIS, Department of Library and Information Science at City, University of London, which seeks to explore the liminal spaces between fandom, fan studies, and Library and Information Science (LIS). It also introduces papers from the inaugural FanLIS symposium, which took place online on May 20, 2021

Beyond the multidisciplinary in fan studies: Learning how to talk among disciplines

In light of the Fan Studies Network's statement regarding fan studies being overrun with whiteness, we are in a unique position to engage in scholarship that challenges the overwhelmingly white and Global North–centric structures that define how we study fan cultures. Multidisciplinarity, which may be understood as disciplines laid side by side, should be contrasted with interdisciplinarity, which requires true dialogue. Despite recent field-shifting work by fan studies scholars such as Bertha Chin, Lori Morimoto, Rukmini Pande, and Rebecca Wanzo, more work needs to be done to both acknowledge and build on current research in transcultural fandom. In a dialogue that reflects the progress of our own striving toward interdisciplinary and transcultural work in fan studies, we seek to demonstrate a possible way forward for the field of fan studies to become more truly interdisciplinary and transcultural in its focus

What if academic publishing worked like fan publishing?:Imagining the Fantasy Research Archive of Our Own

Researchers, universities, and academic libraries develop a range of tools and platforms to make scholarship more accessible. What could these scholarly communications and open access projects learn from examples set by fandom and fan activists, for example, the fan works platform Archive of Our Own (AO3)? This conceptual paper, the result of a brainstorming session by scholars and librarians, proposes that a Fantasy Research Archive of Our Own should excel at making scholarly knowledge production into a visibly, enthusiastically collective endeavor that recognizes many kinds of contributions beyond the publication of traditional research papers

What if academic publishing worked like fan publishing? Imagining the Fantasy Research Archive of Our Own

Researchers, universities, and academic libraries develop a range of tools and platforms to make scholarship more accessible. What could these scholarly communications and open access projects learn from examples set by fandom and fan activists, for example, the fan works platform Archive of Our Own (AO3)? This conceptual paper, the result of a brainstorming session by scholars and librarians, proposes that a Fantasy Research Archive of Our Own should excel at making scholarly knowledge production into a visibly, enthusiastically collective endeavor that recognizes many kinds of contributions beyond the publication of traditional research papers