English Folk Dance and Song Society
The English Folk Dance and Song Society was formed in 1932 through the merger of two organisations, the Folk-Song Society and the English Folk Dance Society, the latter of which had been formed by Cecil Sharp in 1911. It has been much maligned over the years, often rightly so, but these days it does much good work, in particular in making its priceless and unique manuscript holdings available online - in particular through the Full English archive, which presents facsimiles of the folk song collections of all the major figures: including Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Lucy Broadwood, Henry Hammond, George Gardiner, Janet Blunt, George Butterworth, Francis Collinson and Ann Gilchrist.
Much of this good work can be attributed, at least in part, to Malcolm Taylor, the Society's Librarian and all-round good egg. The EFDSS library is called the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, in honour of the composer, and our repertoire would be much poorer without access to the riches which the library contains.
EFDSS website http://www.efdss.org
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library Online http://www.vwml.org