James Henry,

I said absolutely nothing about 'collecting practices' in Glencolmcille! I was only responding to your woeful comments regarding the circulation of private tapes (and your failure to understand that commercial exploitation of these is simply bootlegging).

As for my interpersonal skills, I don't think your own suggest that you are worthy to comment (and look up 'anal retention' in a decent summation of Freud's works when you next have the chance). It would be extremely helpful if posters to this and any other topic on Mudcat actually bothered to read threads fully before commenting.

For the record, in case you aren't familiar with my name, I wrote 'The Rough Guide to Irish Music' and am the co-author of the Rough Guides to Dublin and Ireland, as well as contributing regularly to 'fRoots' and 'Songlines' magazine.

Folkiedave - the NSA does have original copies of PK's recordings, according to its catalogue. However, when I accessed one of these it transpired to be a taped copy of PK's recording of the original BBC master disc, complete with clicks. Since I was only interested in that one disc I did not investigate the rest of the collection (and could not because of the NSA's very restrictive rules of access - plus associated fees).

Captain Birdseye - the NSA's costs for reproducing the contents of its sound archive have nothing to do with royalties, but are simply fixed charges levied for copying material. I suggest you check www.bl.uk/nsa for further details of the NSA's charges.