I have now had a chance to listen to the programme. It is excellent.... fascinating. The programme is well constructed and the singing extracts from the collection are all gripping, remarkable performances of some rare material. I can only say, "Well Done & Congratulations" to Jim & Pat.

However, I must take exception to the rather jaundiced element in Jim's post of 29 Jul 17 - 04:00 AM especially where he writes:-
"I respond as I do because I'm fed up with the snide in-fighting that has turned the British scene from the healthy one I was part of to the shadow it seems to have become today - sorry'bout that Vic, it still remains important to me."

There is much that is dreadful and much that is excellent in my view in both research and study and performance in both the British and Irish scenes. If Jim cannot remember 'snide in-fighting' amongst Irish folk musicologists then he has a shorter memory than I have.

At the end of the programme, Jim and Pat speak with justified pride that Clare Libraries are digitising and making their collection widely accessible on the internet, Brilliant! But they are not the only people doing this. At national level, The Full English database developed over the last few years at https://www.vwml.org/search/search-full-english now has something of the same quantity and quality as those of ITMA and The School of Scottish Studies. There are also quite a number of schemes going on at a local county level. The database assembled by Gyilym Davies and Paul Burgess in Gloucestershire is very impressive.
Here in Sussex Tina and I are on the management committee of the an ambitious project called Sussex Traditions and we have each put in hundreds of hours over the last three years in supporting Steve Roud in digitising, transcribing, annotating, researching, gathering and documenting etc. etc. material to include in a database that currently holds around 5,700+ items and is still growing quickly.

I ask Jim not to reply to this post on Mudcat because of the tendency for this forum for disagreements to descend to slanging matches that I will not participate in. Rather could I kindly suggest that he has a good look at where we have got up to at http://sussextraditions.org/collection/ and then contact me by email to discuss it, perhaps share approaches etc. He has my address. I look forward to hearing from him..... and Jim & Pat, keep up the good work!