An announcement from a colleague, please contact her off-list at [log in to unmask] (also, please excuse cross-postings): Hello all, I am writing today to solicit feedback that hopefully will be included in a forthcoming anthology. *Porn Archives*, to be published by SUNY Press, is a compilation of essays exploring how archives preserve and provide access to pornography, among other topics related to the burgeoning field of Porn Studies. I have included an overview of the book at the bottom of this message. My contribution will be an annotated bibliography of archives that house collections of probable interest to researchers in this field. In addition to searching library catalogs for materials, I am sending out this inquiry in the hope that institutions with un-cataloged or under-publicized materials can respond and be included. I am aware of some of the more well-known organizations collecting these materials (such as the Kinsey Institute), but I hope that my contribution to this volume will highlight institutions that most scholars overlook in the course of their research. I know what you might be thinking: *pornography is difficult to define! How can I determine what counts?* To aid in that process, I have included some specific criteria below. Of course, I also welcome further questions if you’re unsure about a particular item or collection. Collections of interest should include published or gray literature (thus excluding materials like letters and diaries), and may include significant collections of books from publishers that are known for publishing pornography, even if some of the books in the collection may not be pornographic (examples include Grove, Olympia, and Naiad). Other examples of materials of interest include: - erotic pulp fiction - sex manuals - substantial runs of mainstream publications such as *Playboy, Penthouse, Oui, Hustler, Adult Video News,* and *Players* - zines, small press items, and limited edition vanity press publications - penny papers, Tijuana bibles, and adult comics If you have collections that you think fit these criteria, please respond off-list by *August 27* with: - the name and address (both web and physical) of the institution - names and descriptions of collections to be included - any other information you think may be useful to researchers Please let me know if you have questions, and I look forward to hearing from you! Thank you for your time, Caitlin Caitlin Shanley Assistant Professor Instructional Design and Technology Librarian Lupton Library University of Tennessee at Chattanooga [log in to unmask] (423) 425-5279 (office) *Overview of PORN ARCHIVES Where and how is pornography archived? How have archives conditioned access to pornography? How do archives preserve, while simultaneously restricting access to, their contents? If our modern understanding of pornography came into being with the gathering of Pompeian artifacts in the “secret museum,” how might pornography and the archive be mutually constitutive? Pornography, more readily available now than ever before, saturates our political debates, our inboxes, and our imaginations. Yet, our public institutions have historically identified pornography in the process of trying to regulate it. As its presence has increased in the public sphere, however, debates about porn’s place in our society have become not only increasingly urgent but also increasingly complex. By the late 1980s several scholars, Linda Williams most notably, called for a move beyond the anti-censorship / anti-pornography debates that characterized discourse in the United States during the post-WWII era. In the spirit of that critically engaged scholarship, which broadened the field of discourse, we recently organized a public conference on pornography in Buffalo that attempted to take stock of where Porn Studies exists twenty years after its emergence. Following that successful conference, and spurred by ongoing work in a graduate seminar on pornography that Tim Dean taught at the University at Buffalo, we envision a lasting contribution to the field of porn studies by putting together a blockbuster anthology titled Porn Archives, to be published by SUNY Press. The volume seeks to build upon the solid foundation of porn scholarship from the past twenty years, while also enlarging the field by investigating how public institutions mediate our experience of sexuality, our definitions of obscenity, our access to pornographic texts, and our understanding of material preservation. The question of the archive has a long history of academic engagement that warrants further consideration, as digital technologies—from cell-phone cameras to online databases—reconfigure how we produce and transmit sexually explicit representations. As the common parlance of porn increasingly denotes the pornographic (moving) image, we are interested in the altered status of written pornography and in how classifications of pornography are made and remade. With this volume, we aim to turn porn studies back on itself to discover and attend to its as yet unearthed objects of study. Porn Archives will inaugurate a more expansive and nuanced field of porn studies. * ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.ScreenSite.org