Fanac Fan History Project, The
Entry updated 8 September 2025. Tagged: Community, Fan, Publisher.
This project, launched in 1994, aims to preserve the history of sf and Fandom – in particular Fanzines and Convention publications – and make its ever-increasing archive available online at its website Fanac.org, active since 1996. It is sponsored by the Florida Association for Nucleation and Conventions, Inc, which organized the 1992 Worldcon and whose acronym FANAC is the long-established Fan Language shorthand for "fan activity". Also included in the online archive are APA (which see) mailings, documents relating to Fan Funds (including many winners' trip reports), single-author collections of writing by noted fan writers, "fanthologies" assembling work by many hands on particular themes (such as the best writing of a particular year), artwork, photographs, and sound recordings. The Fanac project has inherited the audio archive of the Science Fiction Oral History Association. Many hundreds of volunteers have contributed their efforts by providing and/or scanning old publications, and although the website is perpetually "under construction" it has become a huge and valuable resource for the historians of sf and, especially, fandom. The current team leaders are Joe Siclari and Edie Stern.
The Fanac Fan History Project is often referred to by the name of its web domain, Fanac.org. Under that name it received the last three FAAn Awards presented for best website (2019, 2020 and 2021) before the category was discontinued. [DRL]
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