Ten Years On: A Celebration
of Fandom and Friendship |
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The Electronic Girls' School Community
Helen
Aveling: Where shall I start? At the beginning, but
where is it? Five years ago? Eight years ago? No, in many
ways it is ten years ago. When Ju was doing her research for
her PhD and first screened "The Chalet School Revisited",
she talked about 'hypertexts' and all sorts of other things
and most of us didn't know what she was talking about! Why?
The answer is that the web, as we know it now, didn't exist.
It didn't come into its current form till '95-'96 or thereabouts.
Ten years ago there wasn't such a thing as the "Electronic
Girls' School Story Community". It didn't exist. Ju's
research and website was a prime mover in the early years
of the "electronic community".
What is the "Electronic
Girls' School Story Community"? So what
is this "Electronic Girls' School Story Community"?
It is both fan-based and club-based websites and communities,
which quite happily co-exist side-by-side on the web. What
is more interesting is that with the web came the internationality
that E B-D was advocating, certainly in the earlier books.
Clubs, and the more fluid online communities, can truly say
that they have an international base in a way not possible
before. Sites like eBay and Amazon have made it easier for
collectors from outside the U.K to find Chalet School books
- I'm not saying anything about prices though! 'Belonging' As well as the fluid communities
that Charlotte and Kerri are going to talk about in a few
minutes, there's the sense of 'belonging' that, for me at
least, didn't exist before the Internet was such a part of
my everyday life. The essence of the Electronic Community
is just this: the awareness and ability to contact others
who won't think you are mad to still be reading and collecting
girls' school stories. Even if you live in the back of beyond,
you can still be a part of this Electronic Community if you
have access to the Internet. You can enjoy club websites or
the various online communities, and be reassured that you
are not the oddity you may have felt before you discovered
this network of people - all thanks to the Internet. NCC website Moving on to the New Chalet Club and its web presence now, the website first went online in November '98, with FOCS joining us online in August '99, The site at that time was a very primitive thing, as you'll see from the illustration from the Home Page from May '99. Why? I was learning to build websites as I went along! The reason the site looks very amateurish today is because I learnt HTML as I went along, but back in '98 it was quite respectable. Ju knew more about websites than I did at that point! Chaletopia - a precursor The club site wasn't the
first site for Chalet fans; the most widely known early site
was Chaletopia. It went online in April '96, but had sadly
disappeared by early '97. Chaletopia was a true fan-based
site of its time. It was essentially a Guestbook site, but
it was by no means the only site online then. There were,
and still are, a range of fan-based sites online, but I'll
leave Charlotte and Kerri to talk more about these websites
and other fan-related sites in a few minutes. Visitor involvement In the spirit of the Chalet School, I decided it would be an excellent plan to get synopses for all the Chalet books at least, and to invite visitors to the website to write them. Each synopsis is credited to the name or, in one instance, the pseudonym, of the author, as are the illustrations that were/are not from books in my possession. I also include the country in which the synopsis author was writing from. This shows how widespread Chalet readers are. In the first few years the synopses came in frequently and our virtual library filled up quite nicely. Unfortunately, now that all
the Chalet School and La Rochelle books have been done, along
with a selection of non-Chalet School books, totalling 95
synopses, I will have to commission the remainder, which include
three of thefFill-in titles, as well as Jean of Storms
and The School by the River. If anyone here wants to
contribute to the virtual library of synopses, please see
me afterwards! Worldwide appeal The Internet means that awareness of both The New Chalet Club and FOCS is now truly worldwide. Both clubs have a wider membership than would ever have been hoped for in the pre-Internet days. I think this is a good thing because it links people together, doing away with isolation and replacing it with this community of fans. Prior to the Internet, people had to rely on clubs, who in turn relied on the printed word. You could live very close to another collector and not know it! Book collecting of any kind in those days was a much more solitary occupation than it is today. The Internet means that a collector in a remote location has the same opportunity to buy books as someone literally down the road! National borders cease to mean anything in the Electronic Community, and we have the opportunity to see the spirit of the Chalet School Peace League come to life. If you have, or choose to have, access to the 'Net you have access to an entire lifestyle in which physical distance doesn't matter. Helen Aveling
There are clearly a lot of people out there
using the online resources. Let’s look at a couple of
these in more detail. Liss set up the Chaletian site in 1999, followed
by the CBB in 2002. We are very pleased that she is here and
will tell you more about it herself. Welcome Liss. Although all these sites are set up to discuss similar topics, the community is often quite different on each. Some people are members of more than one mailing list or messageboard but each seems to have its own character. The CBB appears to have a younger age profile than Girlsown, for example and the chatrooms and livejournal site often attract those who already use those facilities. Although clubs such as FOCS and the NCC first fostered the international community and do have members all over the world, the growth of email and easy access to the web have dramatically widened the scope of participation. As we heard from Liss, the CBB has members all over the world, as does Girlsown, and the other online forums. Being in the UK it is a relatively easy matter to meet up with fellow fans but it is not always so straightforward for those overseas, especially in remote areas. Having online friends who share their interests can make a real difference, especially as it is a rather niche interest (and one some are still embarrassed to admit to). Despite never having met, real friendships can be formed and members have a real sense of responsibility towards each other. After 9/11 the Girlsown list was bombarded with messages asking about the New York members and their families as, I’m sure, was the case for many similar sites. Kerri Brennan came to the UK from Australia. Has anyone else been to stay with friends met online that they had not previously met? So far we have been mainly concentrating on mailing lists or messageboards. Most of the book collecting societies also have their own club websites. Helen has just shown us the new look NCC site – lets have a quick look at some of the others. FOCS
site Most club websites tend to be more information
than opinion based with details of the author’s life,
the books they wrote and, in the case of the FOCS website,
details of publishing history and dustjackets. Many societies
have thriving journals and the website is more an online presence
and place for fans to find out how to join, dates of upcoming
evenings etc. rather than the main method of communication.
As I’m sure you will all agree, the growth of online used bookselling has made life much easier in some ways for collectors, however there are some disadvantages. Finding pristine Chalet hardbacks for 50p in a charity shop is now almost unknown as sellers have become much more aware of the huge market in the Girlsown genre. This has led to some very strange pricing – common Enid Blyton paperbacks with the rather ambitious price of £7.50 - or even more - and labelled very rare. For me though the advantages vastly outweigh this. Being able to search through the catalogues of thousands of second-hand shops online is marvellous and, however much I enjoy searching through rows of books in a musty-smelling shop, it is an incredibly convenient way to track down copies of books that you never knew you wanted until they were no longer available. Ebay does seem to be a rule unto itself, depending, as it does, on the vagaries of bidders. You can sometimes pick up real bargains but I’m sure we’ve all seen fairly common books go for incredible prices when, the following week, another seller can’t give their copy away. Being able to compare prices across a range of sellers has brought the price of some items down as well as up. Buyers can pick and choose although obviously, there are some books that don’t come up for sale very often. If anyone does see that first edition of The School at the Chalet, complete with dustwrapper for under £20, please remember to let me know…This has been a very quick skate through the Electronic Girls School Story community – really just an overview of what is available. Please tell us what we have missed out and more about your online experiences.
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The
beginning
Photos
by Lesley Simpson