Steve
"Please tell us more."
Am taking this separately so it doesn't get mixed up with the real subject
Bob Thomson, through his friendship with Ken Goldstein, learned of the existence of The Carpenter Collection and how it was discovered locked away in Carpenter's garage.
Bob and I were friends and on a visit to his home he told me about it and suggested that a copy should be obtained by the V.W.M.L - Bob also introduced us to Goldstein while he was visiting London, who told us more.
I passed on the information to the then Librarian (I think it was Barbara Newlyn, but it might have been Theresa Thom) and she acquired a copy of the recordings and a microfiche set of the transcriptions
The rest is history
I have printed copies of many of the texts and of the recordings somewhere here.
As far as Bright Golden Store is Concerned, way back, while we were collecting from Travellers and in Clare and had not long started recording Walter, we approached the wonderful Lucy Duran at what I think was still the The British Institute of Recorded Sound and asked her was she interested in acquiring copies of our recordings - she jumped at the chance and took our collection as it was back then.
She decided, on the basis of our collection, that her department at BIRS should move from being a musicological department concerned mainly with African and Asian music, and expand to include British music
Since Lucy (sigh!!) took our collection it has remained largely unused due, presumably to financial restrictions
Because of this, we have basically lost interest in donating the rest o our collection to them and have now found a (very willing) home for it in the World Music Department of Limerick University, who are thinking about setting up a web-site to release our, and hopefully other similar collections.
They already have an active interest in Traveller music and have done a considerable amount of work in helping to re-introduce instrumental traditional music back into their community
Just shows you what you can do when you have no problem identifying what folk music is and realise its importance!
By the way, I have always assumed that people are aware that a full set of the Grainger recordings, including some of his Scandinavian material, are included in the NSA collection and have been since N.I.R.S. days
Jim Carroll