Folk Songs in the archive – Where can we find them and are they safe?
Taking the Archive to mean all the collections, large and small, physical and intangible, in our field, this gathering will address a number of important issues.
Recent developments have made it clear that the three fundamental elements in archiving – Make it safe, Make it useable, Make it accessible – can never be taken for granted, and need continuous revision and monitoring. Institutional priorities and resources change, technology goes out of date, websites appear and disappear, search engines are re-designed. Many existing collections need to be processed, and personal collections need to be identified and their survival ensured.
In sum, it is up to us, as creators and primary users, to use our expert knowledge and whatever power we can muster, to maintain, support and monitor our essential materials.
We are holding a full day in-person conference in Gloucester on 18 October 2025. The venue will be the Dunrossil Centre at the Gloucestershire Heritage Hub, Clarence Row, Alvin Street, Gloucester, GL1 3DW. The Heritage Hub is conveniently located for public transport and has ample free car parking for attendees.
The event is free but prior booking is required. It would help us a lot if you could book early if you are planning to come, so we can get some idea of numbers.
The Speakers are:
1 Stephen Miller
2 Chris Wildridge
3 Catherine Ann Cullen
4 Tiffany Hore & Josie Sommer (30 mins)
5 Martin Graebe
6 James Spinney
7 Julia Bishop & Cath Bannister & Mariam Yamin
8 Julia Bishop
9 Steve Roud
Stephen Miller – “My papers: what shall I do with them? The Internet 1.0 researchers and their ‘remaines’
Pen and pencil, paper and ink, wax cylinders and tape, have all been used to create and curate our research materials. The Analogue Age has given way to the Digital Age and now it is zeroes and ones on a hard drive or somewhere in the so-called “cloud.” Any sense of permanency is an illusion and those “Internet 1.0 Researchers” whose Remaines are now digital now face decisions about how to ensure as best as possible that their materials do not disappear down a digital plughole. Complete solutions are definitely not promised but a sense of awareness only; however, some suggestions along the way will be made.
Do not rely on your children to be interested enough in your research to bother about your papers after your death as happened with W.H. Gill.
Stephen Miller formerly held posts at the the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna. Research interests are the folklore, folk song, and folk dance of the Isle of Man, the Scottish folklorists the Rev Walter Gregor and William George black, and the institutional history of the Folk-Lore Society.
Chris Wildridge – Alfred Williams manuscripts as a case-study
Local record offices are vital in the secure storage of material and collections of local folk songs and other materials are a vital element in the social history of each locality. Archival cataloguing practice usually operates at the top tier ‘collection level. For example, in Wiltshire the Alfred Williams songs can largely be found on the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office catalogue with this reference: WSRO: 2598/36 Packet 4 – Wiltshire: Williams, A: MS collection. Using this a researcher would be able to retrieve Packet 4 in which songs identified as ‘Wiltshire’ can be found. That will not tell the online enquirer that included in that Packet is: Aaron’s lovely home collected from Henry ‘Wassail’ Harvey in Cricklade. A different approach using a librarian’s ‘analytical cataloguing’ approach to identifying individual songs is required. The Wiltshire Community History Website is one such. The full text of Aaron’s lovely home, its singer, where collected and Williams’ notes can be found at:
https://apps.wiltshire.gov.uk/communityhistory/Folk/Details/715?isCommunityPage=False
Catherine Ann Cullen – Not Found: There’s a Hole in the Ballad Archive
‘A hole in the ballad’ once described the effect of wear and tear on a slip or broadside ballad, where constant folding and unfolding resulted in some words being rubbed away. Researchers and song enthusiasts in Ireland, as elsewhere, are today faced with a more challenging lacuna — the loss of access to a number of digital archives and collections. This paper will be a personal overview of ballad archives in Ireland that I have used in my research. It will examine how alterations to cataloguing (for instance of the John Davis White Collection at Trinity College Dublin), disappearance of online access (as in the case of the Colm Ó Lochlainn collection at University College Dublin), and temporary inaccessibility of some materials (as at National Library of Ireland) have created challenges not only for access but for ensuring that ballads referenced in our research can be found by those reading our work into the future. This paper will pose some questions that perhaps we can solve as a community, such as how we should deal with ‘link rot’, for example when a revamped digital collection makes obsolete the references we have used in published research. The paper will also consider advice from specialist librarians on how we might campaign for renewed access to missing digital resources.
Catherine Ann Cullen recently completed an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at Poetry Ireland and University College Dublin, and is still researching a book on lost street poets of 19th century Dublin. She was inaugural Poet in Residence at Poetry Ireland 2019- She is an award-winning poet, children’s author and songwriter. She is a recipient of the prestigious Kavanagh Fellowship (2018) and has twice won the Business to Arts Award for Best Use of Creativity in the Community for her residencies. She has presented her research into Irish broadside ballads at many conferences, and some of her work is published by The Ballad Partners. Her eighth book, a poetry collection entitled Storm Damage, is published by Dedalus Press (October 2025).
Tiffany Hore & Josie Sommer – The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library: Safeguarding Folk for the Folk
The English Folk Dance and Song Society’s Vaughan Williams Memorial Library is England’s national collection for folk music and dance, incorporating a library, and an archive of international importance. We are guardians of the physical archives of many luminaries of both English folk song revivals, and our electronic archives are used by countless folk researchers around the world via our online catalogue. We are unique and realise our grave responsibility to not only guarantee the safety of our material, but to enable its use by, and accessibility to, as many people as possible. This paper presents the ways in which we do this, covering the importance of suitable storage and environmental monitoring, packing, handling, pest control and disaster management. We also outline our digitisation priorities, and the data security we employ to mitigate the risks to our electronic files and resources. We stress the perils of complacency, and acknowledge that there are things we could do better, outlining the hurdles we face in doing so. Constant reappraisal, critical self- examination, risk mitigation and an ability to problem solve are crucial components of the work of archivists and librarians. Finally, we outline why an archive needs its users in its constant effort to break down barriers to usability and access.
Tiffany Hore is the Director of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at the English Folk Dance and Song Society in London. She has written on Vaughan Williams, spoken at conferences in the UK, Austria, Ireland and Italy, and organised conferences on traditional tunes, folk dance, the song collectors, and Vaughan Williams and folk song. Before taking up her current role in 2020, she studied History at Cambridge University and Library and Information Studies at UCL, worked in medical libraries for some years, and then at London Contemporary Dance School, UCL’s Institute of Education, and King’s College London.
Outside of libraries, she plays the flute, runs, and rides horses.
Josie Sommer joined the English Folk Dance and Song Society as Archivist in June 2025. With experience in artist’s studio, national gallery, higher education and charity settings, she has worked on several large cataloguing projects, including the Colin St John Wilson & Partners archive at RIBA. She catalogued the archive of Oxford House community and arts centre, as well as leading on a project to digitise 10,000 items from their collection and develop a digital archive microsite. Outside of archives, she is learning to play the accordion and makes art.
Martin Graebe – The Baring-Gould Manuscripts – Current status
In his lifetime Sabine Baring-Gould gave two important manuscripts of the songs he had collected to Plymouth Library which were, for many years, the basis of understanding his collection. In the last two decades more manuscripts have been discovered which have expanded our knowledge about his work dramatically. These are now kept in several locations. In this short presentation Martin Graebe describes the manuscripts and their availability for study.
Martin Graebe is an independent researcher, writer, and singer, who has studied and written about a number of aspects of traditional song, with several scholarly articles published in Folk Music Journal. He has edited The Forgotten Songs of the Upper Thames: Folk Songs from the Alfred Williams Collection for the Ballad Partners. His book As I Walked Out: Sabine Baring-Gould and the Search for the Folk Songs of Devon and Cornwall (2017) received both the Folklore Society’s Katharine Briggs Award and the W. G. Hoskins Prize. He has been the Secretary of the Traditional Song Forum since its inception. Martin and his wife, Shan, sing traditional songs together, with a repertoire based mainly on the traditional songs of southern England and in particular those collected by Sabine Baring-Gould.
James Spinney – Folklore and Documentary in Conversation
Folklorists and documentary makers face many similar challenges: recording and working through hundreds of hours of material and combing through archives to uncover recordings from the past. Recent AI developments have transformed documentary practice, streamlining work that was previously time-intensive or required specialised technical know-how. Transcripts that once took weeks to produce can now be generated in a fraction of the time, whilst AI restoration tools can excavate voices from deep layers of noise. This talk looks at some of these tools and techniques, asking how creative exchange between folklorists and documentary makers might enrich both practices.
James Spinney’s work takes creative approaches to non-fiction, often rooted in sound. His debut feature film Notes on Blindness – constructed from the audio-diaries of the writer John Hull – was nominated for three BAFTAs. Since then he’s gone on to make Emmy and Peabody Award-winning work for the BBC, Arte, Netflix and The Guardian. Last year he began working on a series of audio pieces about children’s culture, the first of which – Iona Opie and The People In The Playground – can be heard on BBC Sounds. He’s currently working on Everybody Gather Round, an exploration of the recordings made by Nigel Kelsey in London schools in the 1980s
Julia Bishop, Mariam Yamin & Catherine Bannister – Finding Folk Song in the Archives of Cultural Tradition, University of Sheffield
This talk will provide an overview of the folk song holdings of the Archives of Cultural
Tradition, which were transferred from the University of Sheffield’s National Centre for
English Cultural Tradition (NATCECT), previously the Centre for English Cultural Tradition
and Language (CECTAL), to the University Library’s Special Collections and Archives in
Through outlining basic information about the folk song materials, such as their
provenance, formats, extent, dates, and geographical locations, and indicating what finding
aids or other documentation currently exists for them, we hope to build a picture of what is
known about the songs and their performers, and to identify what needs to be done to ensure
the collections are preserved, navigable and accessible, both now and in the future.
Julia Bishop is a research associate in the School of Education, University of Sheffield, and
an honorary research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. A trained folklorist, she
specialises in both traditional song and children’s folklore, working with archives (e.g. the J.
M. Carpenter Collection, the Iona and Peter Opie Archive), and undertaking fieldwork (e.g.
on local songmaking in Newfoundland, and children’s games and songs). Her publications
include The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (co-edited with Steve Roud, 2012)
and contributions to Play in a Covid Frame (Beresin and Bishop, 2023) and Playing the
Archive: From the Opies to the Digital Playground (Burn, Potter, Cowan and Bishop, 2025).
Mariam Yamin is Senior Archivist for Special Collections at the University of Sheffield
Library. She manages the Archives of Cultural Tradition alongside a large number of other
archive collections covering a broad range of subjects. She is a professionally qualified
archivist and worked at a number of different organisations before joining the University of
Sheffield, including Guardian News & Media where she was Head of Archives.
Catherine Bannister is a visiting researcher at The University of Sheffield in the School of
Education. She has worked on various projects connected to children’s play, past and present,
drawing on the Archive of Iona and Peter Opie, and on international studies into children’s
digital play, learning, and wellbeing. She also teaches on creative participatory research
methods with children and young people. She has a longstanding interest in contemporary
rites of passage for youth and her monograph Scouting and Guiding in Britain: The Ritual
Socialisation of Young People (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) was shortlisted for the Katharine
Briggs Award 2023. She is a co-organiser of the Contemporary Folklore Research Centre at
TUOS.
Julia Bishop – Children’s Song and Musical Games in the Archives
Children and young people have learnt, performed, (re-)created, transmitted, preserved and
prompted songs and musical games throughout history. These songs and games, like other
kinds of folklore by and for the younger generation, are an important source for studying their
cultural worlds and childhood experiences. This brief talk will report on an ongoing project to
identify collections of children’s folklore held in British and Irish repositories, and to map
their content and geographical and historical scope. The project is intended as a first step
towards widening access to these materials, making them cross-searchable, and enabling their
use in research and education, including as a stimulus for the documentation of contemporary
childhoods for historians of the future.
Steve Roud – The State We’re In
An analysis of current problems In the past fifteen to twenty years, library and archive provision in our little world have changed dramatically. Very good things have happened, which we now take for granted, but recent developments have shown that we can never relax, because major problems arise, which are often beyond our control, and which threaten to reverse many of our gains. My approach to the effective management of historical material is summed up in the three- part mantra – Make it safe, Make it usable, Make it accessible – and it is clear that all three aspects need to be constantly monitored by us, as donors, professionals, and users. The British Library cyber attack, for example, didn’t threaten the data – it is safe enough – but it knocked out the access for several years, and they had already dumbed down their search capabilities. Several other key sites have done the same. So the emphasis switches from safety to access. The larger the organisation, the less likely our material will be a priority, the less likely it will be given specialist attention, so the focus is needed on usability. The Google simple-search approach is not the answer, and I’m dubious about AI.
Steve Roud is a retired local studies librarian and now a freelance writer and researcher in
folklore and social history, with a current focus on traditional song across the Anglophone
world, along with street literature and other cheap print. He is particularly interested in ways
of providing effective access to material and information, by way of indexes, online
databases, meetings, publications, and whatever other means come to hand. His Roud Indexes
are widely used as a research-tool in the field.