The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion): Building a Socially Constructed Archive of Grateful Dead Artifacts

  • Robin Chandler, University of California (Santa Cruz), chandler [at] ucsc [dot] edu
  • Susan Chesley Perry, University of California (Santa Cruz), chesley [at] ucsc [dot] edu
  • Kevin S. Clarke, University of California (Santa Cruz), ksclarke [at] ucsc [dot] edu

code4lib 2012, Tuesday 7 February 2012, 14:20-14:40 (slides available online)

The Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California (Santa Cruz) is a collection of over 600 linear feet of material, including: business records, photographs, posters, fan envelopes, tickets, video, audio (oral histories, interviews and music) and 3-d objects such as stage props and band merchandise. In addition, with the release of the Grateful Dead Archive Online website in 2012, the Archive will start actively collecting artifacts from an enthusiastic community of Grateful Dead fans.

This talk will discuss the challenges of merging a traditional archive with a socially constructed one. We will also present the first round of development and explain how we're using tools like Omeka, ContentDM, UC3 Merritt, djatoka, Kaltura, Google Maps, and Solr to lay the foundation for a robust and engaging site. Future directions, like the integration/development of better curation tools and what we hope to learn from opening the archive to contributions from a large community of fans, will also be discussed.