I remember Marie Slocombe well from my BBC days (mid-60s to mid-70s) - a formidable lady. Also Tony Trick, who I believe becamer successor. One of the tasks of archive staff was to go out armed with Uher and other machines to make all sorts of recordings for adding to the archive.

I'm always recorded of Peter Sellers' "folk song archive" parodies, and feel sure that both he and George Martin, who produced them, had had a good listen in the Archive basement at some point!