Hello, and welcome to the Archive of Our Own’s video tutorial series.
This tutorial explains the general process of claiming stories that have been imported from pre-existing archives to the Archive of Our Own,
or ‘AO3’ for short, by Open Doors, another project of the Organization for Transformative Works.
You should have already received an e-mail inviting you to claim stories that had been registered to your e-mail address
in the pre-existing archive.
If you don’t have an AO3 account, or you don’t have one connected to that address, the e-mail should look like this.
The first two paragraphs will give you more background information on the import, and reference the import announcement.
The email also includes a link to the Open Doors FAQ, and to the Support committee: a great resource for the AO3 itself.
If you’re familiar with the terms used in the e-mail you received, please skip to Part 2.
If you found the e-mail confusing, keep watching this video.
To begin, archivists often request that fanworks be imported as restricted.
Restricted fanworks are only visible to users logged into AO3, and kept off the radar of search engines.
Even if a reader directly enters the URL of a restricted work, they’ll only see this page.
This allows archivists to limit the viewing of imported works while authors claim their works and decide options for their work themselves.
If an archivist requests that imported works be made publicly-viewable after a grace period,
that information will be in the third paragraph of the e-mail.
While not always the case, our coders may be able to set up the archive import so that URLs—web links—automatically redirect.
This means that if someone had listed your story on a recs page or in their bookmarks, and they clicked on that link,
they could automatically be redirected to the fanwork’s new home at the AO3.
If you have an AO3 account under a different e-mail address, you may have already uploaded copies of your stories.
If you used the AO3 URL importer feature, those stories will not be imported again.
If you uploaded them manually, then there will be duplicates of the stories.
In that case, you can still claim the newly-imported stories to keep the URL redirect, if applicable,
and use our merge tool, currently in development, to combine the hit counts and reviews of both copies,
while keeping only one story body.
You may also request that Open Doors reset the redirect to point toward the copy you uploaded yourself.
Claim the newly imported works, and then write to Open Doors with your AO3 account name, your account name on the original archive,
and links to both the original archive URL, and the URL of the fanwork designated as the redirect.
Thanks for watching the first part of this import tutorial!
We hope it was helpful and that you will continue on to the second part to learn more about claiming your works.
If you still have questions, please reach out to Open Doors and let us know, and we’ll do our best to help.