There are a number of BBC Wales recordings (on the old professional 'discs') at St Fagans in Cardiff. They still belong to the Beeb but are stored at the museum. Until now, I've worked on the recordings which are 'owned' by the museum but I'll have to give some thought to the discs at some point. I have some printouts of stuff that are on some of them. I think copyright might be an issue, as well as the fact that the archives are only open Mon-Fri, 9 to 5 which is a funding issue more than anything.

Re: copyright and redistribution, we've run a project in Pembrokeshire which has had some success releasing archive songs back into the wild from which they came. Started off as quite basic stuff. The museum helped us select songs that were recorded in the 60s and 70s in Pembrokeshire and copied the tracks onto a single (non-copyable) disc in the way that they'd release information to academics. We put together a group of singers and instrumentalists to learn the songs that appealed to them and we backed it up with lectures on the background of the recordings - luckily, the man who made a lot of them is still available and keen on discussing the work. Because we were careful to include names and locations of the source singers, it then took on an oral history tone - a lot of the present day musicians are friends or even family of the source singers and had stories to tell. Then the junior schools wanted to get involved because the kids were related to many of the families. Then the local economic development group came in and had the group sing to local tourism associations because local history and 'colour' is a big thing these days. One song names a couple of specific farms and, at one performance, the current owner of one farm came up to us with a shed load of stories about ghosts, and beer brewing, and all kinds of other stuff. Now a community choir wants to learn a couple of the pieces. And we might be getting a CD out of it which the ec. dev. people will distribute for free to community groups.

Anyway, my reason in mentioning this is that many archives are worried about copyright complications of old material - particularly re: the performers/performances. However, if one or two people relearn the material and teach it back into the original community, it can have a real domino effect.

sian