Re. Peter Kennedy.

In answer to Jim Martin, I'm not sure who he means by 'they' (the BBC, perhaps?) but Sheffield University doesn't have the expertise or the resources to undertake digital archiving of the materials in its own possession, let alone anybody else's. As Jim Carroll has said, there are already digital copies of the Kennedy sound archive, though these were made from acetate copies rather than from the original tapes. The fate (and perhaps location) of the tapes themselves was unclear last I heard, but that was before Kennedy died.

So far as current ownership of the Kennedy materials is concerned, CAMSCO has copies of the Kennedy compilations as edited and issued by him on cassette and, later, CD, and is continuing, for the time being, to sell CDR copies of these under license. As agreed with Kennedy, these are 'as is' and have not been re-mastered. Kennedy's copies of the original recordings are now the property of Topic Records; they plan to issue a series of selections from those, suitably re-mastered, on the lines of the Voice of the People set. My understanding is that the BBC has no problem with this. The material they don't include will then be available under license to CAMSCO. This presumably applies only to the recordings made by Kennedy himself, not to those made by others as part of the BBC project, though he also had copies of those and included material from them on his own compilations. Some of the latter material (recordings made in Hampshire by Bob Copper, for example) has already featured in the Voice of the People set.

This, at least, is what I understand to be the present situation. Dick Greenhaus and Fred McCormick know a lot more about it than I do.