Oh - almost certainly the BBC, if they're the source of the original programmes. It's a bootleg collection and, of course, everyone did it then. Whether the Beeb would actually be bothered about the tracks these days I wouldn't care to say!

In my Beeb days (1968-1975) I regularly grabbed discs from the Sound Archives collection after work, checked them out and took them home to record on my cassette player - whole Goon shows, for example (now all available on the market). But the quality of some of this stuff is pretty poor, with very variable sound quality. I had to boost the waveform with Audacity on some of the tracks to get a reasonable sound, and it was obviously done with the typical domestic equipment of the day.

From what I've played so far (forgetting technical quality for the moment), some of is much better than the rest. The Pentangle sounded pretty crappy and boring - strange, because I was a great fan of them when they first appeared. How tastes change... But Carthy & Swarb sounded absolutely rock solid, and Archie Fisher was superb. Many of the programmes were produced by Frances Line, who was a regular customer of ours in the Reference Section. A very efficient and brisk woman - strange that some of the programmes sound so very much men-in-suits and stilted.