With over 15,000 sites and over 116,000 (and counting) user submitted fieldnotes, news articles, folklore tales, links and pictures, The Modern Antiquarian website is undoubtedly one of the UK’s national online treasures. Alongside the Megalithic Portal, it is one of the foremost places for the general public to share and learn information about our oldest sites. However, unlike the Portal, there is real danger this amazing resource could vanish forever.
Julian Cope’s outstanding public spirit has paid for the building and maintenance of the Modern Antiquarian and has continued to pay for the not inconsiderable cost of hosting it for over 15 years. Let us be the first to say thank you for such amazing generosity. Also, we have no reason to believe it is likely to stop and trust it will continue for years to come. But we can’t rely on that generosity for ever and we believe that the site should be preserved by the nation, for the nation. This resource has been created from literally years of human endeavor by thousands of people and must be preserved for our children and grandchildren to enjoy.
Fortunately a mechanism for preservation exists, The UK Web Archive provided by The British Library. They are archiving important UK websites forever. The aforementioned Megalithic Portal is on there and we believe it essential that The Modern Antiquarian is preserved too. Please visit their nomination page and add your voice to the growing clamor, we have!
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28/03/2016 at 11:12
davidunderdown95
To be included in the open access web archive the site owner needs to nominate it. Since the e-legal deposit regulations came into force a few years ago it should be included in the whole UK domain web crawl, but the sites in that can presently only be viewed on a dedicated terminal in one of the UK copyright libraries