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 Grateful Dead Archive is a testament to the band's understanding of the importance of recording its legacy. The archive includes nearly a thousand boxes of flyers, posters, written correspondence, and even the original marionettes from the 'Touch of Grey' video. The archive also reflects the countercultural and psychedelic aesthetics of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in the 1960s, with visuals that have become a sort of secret handshake among fans. The band's newsletter, launched in 1972, was the first edition of a deeply loyal fan club, and the band's ticketing hotlines were a 24-hour service where fans could order concert tickets directly from the band. The Grateful Dead put an enormous amount of effort into preserving this history, so much so that it's now a special collection at a research university. The band's approach to its music archive is also defined by accessibility, with anyone able to browse the collection and access the music archive. The Vault, a climate-controlled warehouse storage facility in Southern California, 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 charged with managing those recordings is an archivist and 'legacy manager' named David Lemieux, who is very aware of how fortunate he is and doesn't take it for granted. The band's business model, which eventually changed from a living-in-the-same-house musical collective to a multimillion-dollar enterprise, was not carefully calculated and planned over the years. Crucial business decisions were often based on a spirit of hippie collectivism rather than on a motivation for profit. The infrastructure needed to run a one-of-a-kind archive like The Vault has been supplied by reissue specialist Rhino Entertainment, a division of Warner Music Group. Rhino has been issuing an elaborate, limited-edition concert box set once a year, with the most recent being a complete Europe '72 release.
