The money would have been better spent on digitising their archive and setting up an open access website, along the lines of The Max Hunter Collection

So they have an open access website - which you asked for and they are digitising their collections as fast as money allows which you also asked for. And for this they get criticised?

What I was actually talking about back there is digitised open-access Sound Archive along the lines of the Max Hunter Folk Song Collection. You know the sort of thing - recordings of real people singing, not the jottings of a few exalted bourgeois antiquarians.

The jottings of a few bourgeois antiquarians actually form the basis of much of the material that the folk singers sing in this country. The broadside collections are mainly the work of bourgeois collectors of course as well. And far far more extensive than anything Max Hunter has to offer, interesting and accessible though it is.

And since you clearly have opinions about what the EFDSS spends its money I would have thought membership would help the society and you at the same time.