thanks Patrick, very interesting..........my personal thoughts are.........
did the MoL really need to part with these - assuming all material in roll form then was it that much of a storage problem, or were they hoping for a return favour some time from the States.
I'd always assumed the V. & A. in London exhibits the national glass collection - were they offered this archive do we know........... they have a building the size of west Wales, and would have thought these rolls could have been accommodated easily............ you should see the size of some of the Egyptology articles they store.
Often it's a case of available funds (or rather lack of) for research, rather than storage, that might give rise to parting with material, and could have been the issue here - but would have imagined we had more first hand knowledge in the U.K. with which to assess these, rather than send them overseas.
You can see the Rakow's comments that they are going to need to work with the MoL anyway.