"Jim seems to imply that the library is no longer accessible."
No I am not - I an sying it was never practically usable in the past (not foor more than a couple of people) and, unless space has been freed, thirty years ago books books were being stored in cupboards
I know of one major collection of books and broadsides that was refused because there was no space to accommodate it
Can I just say that, as an electrician, I was contracted by Nibs Mathews to carry our a fairly large amount of electrical work in The House and am fully aware of the wasted and unused space, the potentially very usable rooms that were neglected
The listening facilities were a joke - they were uncomfortable, inadequate and unprotected from theft because there was nobody to supervise their use
Up to the time I (voluntarily) transferred the BBC collection onto tape, they were held on fragile acetate discs - if you wanted to use them, you were handed tham and pointed to a deck - hence the appalling state of the discs containing our folk heritage.

I realise much of this is down to lack of funding, but as few folkies took our music seriously, you could hardly expect the Arts Council to do so.

I have helped run clubs where, if the club room needed cleaning up to make it hospitable for club nights, volunteers would be called for (and got willingly)

As fior the Carpenter Collection - as an instigator of obtaining the collection, I was able to pull a few strings and get a fair number of the microfiche songs poorly photocopied
That was pre-computer days so I bought some spring grip golders and stuck what I had on a shelf so I could use them without going blind
Since then, I have digitised them - it took a long time due to the state of the Xerox copies
It took me a few months
I am over the moon that, after a little over 40 years of having obtained them they are now accessible

I have every respect for the team, but as people seem to be prepared to believe that folk songs are not particularly special and are little different than the pop songs churned out by the music industry, I hear the sound of swinging stable doors and bolting horses.
It seems to me that all this would have been possible decades ago if the will had been there

We once booked Irish whistle player, Micho Russell to play at our club only to find that a week before he was due to go on we lost our premises
We were then asked to run a singing night with our guest in the cellar of C # House on the night of the AGM
We wre in the basement singing and playing our Tradition stuff, while our officers and their guests where swinging away in the big hall in their bow ties and long frocks (don't think HRH Maggie was there that night)
During their interval, they sent down for us to send up cabaret to entertain them during their caviar and champers - out of divilment we sent up Micho in his gansey and cloth cap.
He held is own - as we knew he was well able to, the ladies and gents upstairs kepr peering out of the window looking for the hovering space-ship
I remember a science fiction film in my youth entitled, 'When Worlds Collide' - that was the night it happened
It was then I realised that EFDSS was run by people who neither knew or cared very much about our music
If things hadn't been this way, Pat and I wouldn't have had to go to Limerick Uni to seek a home for our archive (we know of archives similar to ours who haven't bees as lucky as we have been
A gang of us actually approached the N.S.A. to see if we couldn't set up an archive to store our heritage somewhere were it would be guaranteed a future - nothing happened until the B L moved to Euston Road

I'm not blowing trumpets here - we failed
I'm just trying to show I'm not throwing stones from an armchair
Jim Carroll