"Has anyone thought to ask NY, NJ, CN, PA, WA or MA stations about recording ??? "

I will gladly bring WFDU-FM's Marantz hard drive recorder and donate its use and my services to record workshops. The recorder has a 20gig hard drive and can store about 30 hours of .wav files and I believe significantly more as a high quality MP3, which should suffice for archive purposes. A simple cable and it can patch into a board, or I can bring a couple of mics to setup where an event might not have a sound system. My hope is to record the two oral history workshops that I will be involved in and air portions on my radio program - with everyone's permission of course.

I completely agree with Howard on the importance of recording this event and creating an archive, and I offer my help to create such a projrect.

Not having spoken to anyone, I can imagine that there might be factors that the organizers are facing that could prevent recordings - contracts, equipment, and I have seen some venues that will not allow recording for union considerations. All of these items can be overcome with time and money - and I suspect the organizers of the event have their hands full with other details that need to be addressed in order to present this event.

A valid argument can be made that people tend to stay away from attending the actual event if they have access to "free" recordings or broadcasts at a later date. In order for events like Eisteddfod to succeed, people need to attend and not become armchair particpants at home.

However I do think there is potential benefits for the future - aside from all the important considerations that Howard described.   From a radio perpective, I feel that having a broadcast of moments from Eisteddfod will serve as a publicity tool to attract attendees for the future. Ed's eloquent recollections of past Eisteddfods attracts attention, but being able to listen to such recordings would make for a great "commercial" for the future.