The Grateful Dead's legacy is preserved by a dedicated team of archivists, historians, and sound engineers, who have worked tirelessly to record and maintain the band's immense collection of music and memorabilia. The University of California, Santa Cruz's special collection, the Grateful Dead Archive, houses nearly a thousand boxes of archival materials, including flyers, posters, written correspondence, and even the original marionettes from the 'Touch of Grey' video. This collection reflects the countercultural and psychedelic aesthetics of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in the 1960s, and has become a sort of secret handshake among fans. The archive also showcases the band's innovative approach to building its community and fanbase, such as the newsletter that launched a deeply loyal fan club and the ticketing hotlines that allowed fans to order concert tickets directly from the band. The Grateful Dead's commitment to preserving their history has resulted in a special collection at a research university, and anyone can browse the collection, as befitting the band's welcoming approach to Deadheadism. The band's music archive, known as 'The Vault,' contains all the master recordings of the band's 13 studio albums, nine live albums released on vinyl, some unreleased studio tracks, and 2,318 live recordings from across every stage of the band's career. The person responsible for managing these recordings is an archivist and 'legacy manager' named David Lemieux, who has worked at the National Archives of Canada and the British Columbia Archives in his native Canada. The band's first official archivist, Dick Latvala, put some order to an unwieldy collection of unlabeled boxes of reel-to-reel tapes, and released a series of commercially available archive recordings called 'Dick's Picks,' later revived by Lemieux as 'Dave's Picks.' The band's sound engineers, such as Betty Cantor-Jackson, have also played a crucial role in capturing the musical magic of the band's live performances, as opposed to just the actual sound coming from the PA speakers. The business model that eventually changed the Grateful Dead from a living-in-the-same-house musical collective to a multimillion-dollar enterprise was not carefully calculated and planned over the years, but rather based on a spirit of hippie collectivism. The infrastructure needed to run a one-of-a-kind archive like 'The Vault' has been supplied by reissue specialist Rhino Entertainment, which has been issuing an elaborate, limited-edition concert box set once a year, such as the 'Europe '72' box set produced by Lemieux. Bob Weir spoke often of a 300-year legacy for the band's music, and the Vault recordings and the UC Santa Cruz collection make that vision a possibility for the fans, the scholars, and the casually curious.
