The Gossamer Project is a group of specialty archives that, combined, contain the vast majority of X-Files fan fiction on the Internet. In the mid to late 1990s, the Gossamer Archives/Project was one of the "big three" single media fandom-focused archives on the Internet, and remained the largest single fandom fan fiction archive until the emergence of various Harry Potter archives in the early 2000s.
As of April 2007, the archive contains 35,192 database entries, with stories dated from May 1995 through April 2007.
History
First archive
The original Gossamer Archive was opened on May 4, 1995 by Vincent Juodvalkis after mirroring files from all the older FTP sites which collected stories from alt.tv.x-files.creative (ATXC) Usenet newsgroup. He began collecting/archiving all fan fiction posted to ATXC, and later, from the X-Files Fan Fiction mailing list. In early 1996, an FTP mirror site was set up at the Free University of Berlin, maintained by Vera. In April 1996, Vincent posted to ATXC that his archive was receiving over 100,000 hits per week. Because he was worried that the bandwidth consumption was having a negative effect on Ohio-State's network, he was considering solutions, including moving the archive to a commercial site and selling advertising space on the front page to pay for the heavy-duty bandwidth and disk space (235 MB) requirements.On July 3, 1996, Vincent announced the projected shutdown of the Ohio-State site, citing a lack of time and network saturation.
Revival
During the summer of 1996, several alternative sites were created, including Stef Davies's UK site, Adam Lee's Australian site, and Harri Nyman's Finnish site. On August 12 of that year, Natasha (aka Kelsy) began the "Gossamer Project", a project to database, categorize and summarize all the currently archived stories,. Originally, her site was only a collection of HTML links to the other archives, but when she found a US-based server willing to host a site with the disk and bandwidth requirements of Gossamer, she launched a full US mirror site. By early 1997, most of the other archive attempts had consolidated under the Gossamer Project umbrella, generally using the database and HTML page generation scripts created by Natasha. Several types of files, including unfinished stories and specialty files (poems, filks, non-fiction) were separated to their own sites. In February 1997, the site on the X-Philes.com server was created as a test site for improvements to the Gossamer database and page generation scripts. On May 31, 1997, Natasha announced the closure of the Gossamer USA (Simplenet) site, and her retirement from archiving.