I could imagine a non-fan (or semi-fan) wanting to make an archive site as coding practice for business or legal archving purposes--fanfic would give you lots of free content, with multiple categorizations, some of which are subcats of others (fandom & pairing are related; genres like angst and humor aren't; fic length, rating and author are other search features people might want).
People have different wishes for sorting and searching, and there's hassles of accessibility--should everyone have access to everything, or is some stuff members-only or even some-members-only (sorted by age for fanfic--but a law firm might have "attorneys only" docs.)
It'd be a great coding project... but the authors would want some assurance that it won't dissolve when the main coding team gets hired by a law firm or city library.
--- And the planned archive at OTW isn't based on "gee, we wanna have a multifandom archive!" It was based on "dammit, we're tired of all these archives changing the rules on us... we need one run by people who know what fandom needs, and I guess that's us." It's not sparked by altruism--the people working on it want a stable archive for their own selfish reasons.
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People have different wishes for sorting and searching, and there's hassles of accessibility--should everyone have access to everything, or is some stuff members-only or even some-members-only (sorted by age for fanfic--but a law firm might have "attorneys only" docs.)
It'd be a great coding project... but the authors would want some assurance that it won't dissolve when the main coding team gets hired by a law firm or city library.
---
And the planned archive at OTW isn't based on "gee, we wanna have a multifandom archive!" It was based on "dammit, we're tired of all these archives changing the rules on us... we need one run by people who know what fandom needs, and I guess that's us." It's not sparked by altruism--the people working on it want a stable archive for their own selfish reasons.