Survey: Archive Copies of Morris Federation Team Websites

About This Document

This document provides an analysis of Morris Federation teams’ websites and, where available, archive copies of the websites held on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Why the Interest in Digital Archives?

Morris and Traditional Dance Are Part of Our Cultural Heritage!

For many morris is a hobby. But morris, and other styles of traditional dance, is more than that: it also forms part of our cultural heritage and, as such, many have an interest in the history of dance sides. In addition to such broad interests many dancers and musicians will have specific interests in the history or sides they have performed with or have connections with.

In light of the aging profile of dancers and the dangers that the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown may have accelerated the closure of sides, it will be important to ensure that online information about sides is not lost.

Some Use Cases

Some examples of how access to archival copies of traditional dance team websites can benefit a range of groups are given below:

• The former dancer who, in his retirement, wishes to reminisce about his time dancing as a youth.
• The new member of the side who wants to find out a bit more about the history of a side she has recently joining.
• The event organiser who would like to know about the history of sides invited to a folk festival (and who doesn’t wish to visit Facebook pages).
• The local historian who has heard that a side from the village has an interesting history which may be of interest for the local history group.
• The local newspaper journalist who would like to write a feature article.
• The cultural heritage historian who has an interest in the evolution of traditional dance, and wishes to explore a range of morris side websites.
• The student studying on a folk-related degree course who feels that evolving attitudes to women in traditional dance would make an interesting project and would like to view resources published in the early 2000s.

You may be able to provide your own examples of additional use cases – feel free to get in touch and we’ll add them.

The Role of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine provides digital archives of public websites – and normally this is done automatically.

The survey described in this document summarises the findings of an analysis of Morris Federation sites which currently have a website, as listed on the Morris Federation’s Teamfinder service.

Methodology

Data on team names and website URLs were exported from the Teamfinder service on 29 January 2022. Once data on individuals members was removed there were 500 records (note this may include a small number of records for sides which have folded recently but have not yet been removed from our database).

Of the 500 records no website was listed for 153 teams (note these teams may have a Facebook or other social media presence but no website listed). The status of website for the 347 teams with a website was analysed using the httpstatus.io service and a total of 29 websites were either non-existent or appeared to have a configuration problem. We then notified team contacts about such problems and subsequently website entries were either removed from our database or entries updated with new URLs. There were subsequently 336 sides with a website listed which were analysed in the survey. The findings are given below.

Survey Findings

Executive Summary

There are:

• 333 websites analyzed in the survey
• 9 websites (3%) do not exist or have configuration problems
• 4 websites are Facebook pages which are not archived.

Discussion

From the table below we can see that archive copies are available for many sides – and in the case of 134 sides usable archives go back to 2001. Here are links to oldest of these archived websites: Alive and Kicking, Berkshire Bedlam, Bristol Jack in the Green, Full Moon Morris, Hook Eagle Morris Men, Invicta Morris, Kirtlington Morris, OBJ Morris, Pilgrim Morris, Ripon City Morris Dancers, Rose and Castle Morris, Stroud Morris Dancers, Weald of Kent Morris and Westminster Morris Men. (Note The Fabulous Fezheads has the oldest archive, dating back to 2000).

Some archives appear to be fairly complete and have the appearance of the main website. However others (for various technical reasons) may be missing images or have broken links to pages and do not have the appearance of the original pages.

What Could Your Side Do?

We encourage sides to check the following table and view the information for your side. If your archival website is missing images or looks strange you may wish to investigate further: this can be due to configuration settings on your website or the hosting company. Or if the most recent archive is incomplete, with key pages missing, you can request that such pages are included in a subsequent archive, as described in the Morris Federation’s document “Digital Preservation: Using the WayBack Machine“.

If you do not currently have a website listed in the Morris Federation’s Teamfinder service but had one previously, you may find that copies of the now-defunct website are held in the WayBack Machine but you will have to know the old domain name (or domain names if your side has had multiple websites during its life) which you can use with the WayBack Machine.

If you decided to use a Facebook page rather than a website (to avoid the costs and requirements of technical expertise to run a website) you will have to accept the loss of the WayBack Machine’s archiving capabilities.

The document “Digital Preservation: Using the WayBack Machine” provides further information about using the WayBack Machine.

Findings

We welcome feedback on this document.

Status of this Document

Document published: 6 Feb 2022

Licence for this Document

This document is available with a Creative Commons Sharealike (CC-BY) licence. In brief, this means you can copy and make changes to this document provided you give acknowledgements to the author/publisher. A suggested wording for acknowledgements is:

This document is based on the "Survey of Archival Copies of Morris Federation Team Websites" document by Brian Kelly, Comms and IT volunteer with the Morris Federation.