Mention the Grateful Dead and most people think of psychedelic jams and clouds of fragrant smoke.
Many would be surprised to learn the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury heroes were diligent archivists of their own music and memorabilia dating back to their 1960s beginnings.
Now, the Dead have gone digital. And you can learn all about it on Friday night.
From 5: 30 to 7 p.m., Robin Chandler gives a free talk at Cinecenta theatre at the University of Victoria. Chandler is speaking on the new digital Grateful Dead archive at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is a librarian at the California university and the former project manager for the Grateful Dead Archive Online.
In 2008, Grateful Dead members Mickey Hart and Bob Weir announced the band would donate its physical archive to UC Santa Cruz. The subsequent Grateful Dead Archive Online was made available to the public in June through the website: gdao.org.
Chandler will talk about the poster artists and photographers represented in the Grateful Dead Archive Online, as well as the band. She'll also explain how the website works.
The digital archive contains about 24,000 items and more than 50,000 scans showing photographs, fanzines, posters and fan recordings. Of special interest are scans of envelopes decorated by fans writing to the Grateful Dead to request tickets.
The archive forms an online community where users can provide comments and submit their own photographs.
This digital archive represents only a "tiny fraction" of the vast physical archive, said Nicholas Meriwether, UC Santa Cruz Grateful Dead archivist.
The master of ceremonies for the talk is Vancouver's Paul Whitney, a longtime Grateful Dead fan and former librarian at the Vancouver Public Library. He says the Grateful Dead's archives - both physical and digital - are unmatched.
Whitney said the Grateful Dead were unusual in that, right from the beginning, they made high-quality recordings of their concerts that were available to fans.
"They were the real leaders in this notion that you achieve success through people hearing your music, and what you want to do is remove all barriers to people hearing your music.
"They proved that embracing your fans, sharing your music really works," said Whitney, noting the Grateful Dead were among the highest-grossing concert attractions of the early 1990s.
The Grateful Dead's musical holdings - still retained by the band - are overseen by a Victoria archivist, David Lemieux. These are housed in a space nicknamed "the Vault," containing thousands of video and audio recordings.
