A very good question and I hope Val replies I expect that basically Thane did what we all do searched for Lightfoot sites and at that pre-Corfid time he would have found Val's, Wayne's and Mathew Fifer's sites (the latter was only a temporary demonstration site that Matthew threw together for his college student class -initially using Wayne Fancis' Newsgroup (alt.music.lightfoot)
FAQ postings
The latter eventually formed the nucleus of Wayne's full site and Matthew's site is no longer nor Matthew's sister (Michelle's) for that matter.
If you go to Wayne's site he makes some comment about the contact from Thane at
http://www.lightfoot.ca/sbreview.htm
But basically I have no doubt that it was the combined efforts of all 3 that helped Thane and Rhino do such a superb job of formulating the Songbook project
the key phrase by Wayne is
"He asked if I would send him as much information on unreleased material that I had available"
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My Gordon Lightfoot webring
starts at
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/lightfoot