Discovered in a Livejournal

Happy New Year to all. May 2018 bring us good things, and "may the world be kind to you", and your loved ones, particularly if 2017 was tough going.

Over the last few months I've been party to conversations about fic: finding fic, saving it, knowing where it all is, and so on. The Automated Hatstand (AH) ceased to exist in August, but the older Hatstand archive is still operating. Hagsrus has run the Proslib mailing list consistently for the past umpty-thump years (more than a baker's dozen?). However the Circuit Archive (CA) has not uploaded any new stories since 2010 (with a sharp falling off for a year or two before that), and there are stability problems with the ageing software used by the site.

( Other places on the Internet )
Of course there are other sites that have gone away forever, and I think fandom is more conscious than ever that there is very little that is permanent on the internet, especially personal sites, and there are only so many pages that have been captured by the Wayback machine. People want to know where the fic is, and if it is safe there, not for the writers alone, but for the readers too.

So where's this going?

Just before the AH closed its doors in August, I made a list of authors and titles. I then started to cross-match that data with the other main archives, with the aim of figuring out:
- What stories were hosted on the AH?
- Where else are the stories archived now?
- What stories do not appear to be archived anywhere now the AH has been deleted?

I got a list of 728 stories (698 when duplicates are removed). Then I downloaded the story lists from the Circuit Archive, Hatstand proper, Proslib and AO3, and crossreferenced. The upshot: out of 698 individual stories, 150 are not archived anywhere else*.

Because the Circuit Archive has been flaky lately I have done much the same thing for the 1954 files (including art and vids) on that archive. The only difference is that I've run out of time so I have only crossmatched with Proslib and AO3 at this stage. It looks as though there are about 180 stories that aren't archived anywhere other than the CA**. That's a lot of fic potentially gone one day. Anyway...

A crossmatched listing of the fic that was on-line at the Automated Hatstand, together with another list of the fanworks currently on-line at the Circuit Archive as of December 2017, is now available as a shareable googlesheet for your downloading pleasure: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1b8KCbIm1qQszQPq3YDXsZvE9RevRI1QFqmd2Bzz8gV4

The idea is that this becomes a resource that people can use to find out what stories they might be missing, and to decide on the ones they want to find.

I've removed formulae and other columns that might make the individual archive sheets too confusing. I'll progress the other archives when time permits and I intend to keep up to date with both AO3 and Proslib. Ideally it would be better to design a relational database and solidify some protocols to deal with the many slight variances between archives, but I have limited dB access now I'm not working, and most people find it easier to deal with a basic spreadsheet or googledoc.

There is a modified copy of the current Proslib index at http://hatstand.slashcity.net/proslib/dvdindex.html

*I think quite a few people downloaded the pdf's before the archive closed, so if you are after a story you should be able to find it by asking the usual sources.
**Of the "missing" stories, some may be in the queue to be sent out to proslib subscribers, of course, and some may be waiting for authors to tinker with them before uploading to AO3. There is also a very small number locked to members of AO3 only, but that isn't a problem for fans with an AO3 login. I have listed these as "no" against AO3 just in case.