"in the last 15 years the BL has placed many audio collections online, the EFDSS has had hundreds of thousands of pounds for placing as many of the mss online, the Carpenter collection has been funded, etc."

If we have failed in selling our music to the general public, then it is not for want of many of us trying, but the fashion has become for music to be presented in a glitzy showbiz way and classical, folk and jazz musicians find it difficult to go along with this. I hate what Parisian Afro-Beat has done to the way traditional African music is presented in Europe but I can see that poor immigrant musicians also want to carve a career for themselves to give them some sort of financial security. They cannot afford to do otherwise.
The job of the older enthusiasts now must be to make the performances that they enthuse over accessible in an attractive way on the internet. Fortunately, we already seem to be ahead of the game with what EFDSS and BL have done in England, ITMA in Ireland and Tobar an Dualchais in Scotland.
The latest trend is for archives of regional/area/county basis to be extended and brought to be the attention of local historians, teachers looking for aspects of their own locality for topics, librarians etc. Archives of County Clare Libraries and the Sussex Traditions project have already been mentioned in this thread, But pioneering local work was undertaken in South Yorkshire and much has been achieved in Devon by the Wren Project and in Gloucestershire. Pete Haywood was speaking to me about starting something similar for South-East Scotland and there are probably others that don't come to mind at the moment.