Thanks, Sean. The kinds of things you describe are what got us started in the first place. In fact, we (the Vancouver Folk Song Society) run two of those things (Camp Sasamat, early Dec each yr., and Camp Alexandra, 1st weekend in July). Rika and I are ready to go a little bit farther, and it's precisely where to go now that we're asking. We started a ballad group here in Vancouver which met monthly for 18 months or so, and corresponded with a similar group in Toronto. Our group would sing and drink and talk, but there wasn't much time for folk to do the kind of research required to get the answers to the questions we were asking. Beyond us appeared as it were a great gulf, until one landed on the shores of academia (and even there, the ballad scholars were somewhere else, not in our part of the world at all). Short of abandoning our jobs (and even our province) to join the academics, how can we move further along? A summer Ballad school (2 weeks, say) led by interesting singers/academics, would be perhaps a place to start, and that's what the query to Mudcatters is: is there such a place? Or anything else?