I'm going to revive this ancient and dormant thread to ask for assistance with a project I'm organizing for Seattle's Northwest Folklife Festival.

Over the 30-year life of the festival, we have accumulated several hundred hours of recordings, including radio broadcasts, soundboard tapes, and on-the-grounds field recordings, along with many of the audition tapes submitted by would-be festival performers. This is a unique and hugely valuable historical record of both traditional and revival performers in the Portland/Seattle/Vancouver region. It's essential that we preserve these recordings before the original tapes deteriorate.

But we're looking for more, and for other recordings by performers who appeared at the Folklife Festival over the years. We're also interested in other, earlier recordings that will help us document the Folk Revival in the Pacific Northwest.

Do you have any old tapes made at the Folklife Festival, or of Northwestern performers at concerts, coffeehouses, parties or other venues? If you do, or if you know of anybody else who might have some old recordings, please post to this thread, or send me e-mail at johnross@well.com. If you have tapes to lend us, we will happily give you copies on CD when we return the originals.

Our plan is to convert the existing recordings to digital form, and place copies of the collection in several public archives where they can be accessible to future researchers. We also want to produce a series of radio programs for regional broadcast, and offer some "best of" compilations for public sale.

Thanks very much for your help.