I agree with you completely.  What I am trying to do with the
summaries is, first, translate the information from Vincent's html
pages into a spreadsheet (finished, except for proofreading) then add
the summaries that already exist (Gil's summary page, Kathleen Fritz
summary FAQ, author's story summaries on the archive). After that,
volunteers could look through the rest of the stories for summaries
the author placed at the front of the story itself.   I think that the
story summaries need to be written by the authors themselves.  I'm not
delusional enough to think that we will ever have summaries for all
the stories or even that all the authors will wish to have their work
catagorized, but it seems presumptuous (and possibly controversial) to
write our own.

It is a massive undertaking, but the data only has to be entered once
by cutting a pasting and merging files (not typing!) and it will be
easy to make changes and generate new html pages for myself and anyone
else who is interested in using the information on their own pages. I
can insert the information into one line of code and it will generate
all the links automatically.  That will also make it easy to change
the links when the archive is moved.

Right now, we need to decide on a hand full of very broad genre
categories.  Keeping in mind that the data is in a spreadsheet, I
could sort the data by one or more of these listings and generate the
topic pages.  I'd like to keep the categories as broad as possible and
a story could fit into one, several, or none of them. The romance
stories could all be generated into one page and inside that page
stories could be identified as Mulder/Scully, Scully/Skinner,
Skinner/other in the author's summary.  Since the ratings are also a
category, there could be not-rated (that would be everything but
NC-17) romance stories and NC-17 romance stories... ;-)

So far, these are the categories that have been suggested:

romance
case file
humor
poem/song
angst
vignettes
crossover
action/adventure
misc - for stories without summaries or genre listings and stories
that the author does not wish to categorize.

I read a neat story recently titled 'Abner'.  It could be classified
under; XF/Bewitched crossover, case-file, and humor.  It was not
rated, so that would distinguish it from 'Colors', which was NC-17
humor.  Depending on how the stories are sorted, both would show up on
a 'humor' list, but not an 'unrated humor' or 'NC-17 humor' list.

*Most importantly* the authors have final say on the classifications,
the summaries, and whether or not their work will be included in this
project.

I will try and put a web page up very shortly so that folks can see
what is possible and give feedback on the organization before we start
working on the whole story list at Gossamer.  BTW, how do you guys
feel about naming this endeavor 'The Gossamer Story Summary Project'
in honor of Vincent and all the work he has done?