I'm often among the first to mock frivolity in academia, but when it comes to the Grateful Dead archive, I'm inclined to be mildly contrary.

For one thing, the university has accepted the donation of a warehouse full of Grateful Dead stuff: correspondence, lyric sheets, ephemera, and apparently even furniture. Maybe they shouldn't have accepted it, but that ship has sailed. Now it needs to be organized and cataloged for use. Jon Stewart apparently believes that work is easy, but it involves far more than simple alphabetizing.

Stewart also may not know that many of the photos or film clips he uses on his show require someone behind the scenes to clear rights and, sometimes, pay for those uses. (Commercial use fees can range anywhere from $25 to, in a few cases, $1,000 or more.) If UC-Santa Cruz can efficiently digitize the most desirable bits of its collection, and maybe even license part of it to a stock agency, it would only take a few image requests per week to cover the annual salary of an archivist and an assistant to do the drudge work. There's serious potential to make money when you own an archive full of doodads that people want to include in books, magazine articles, and museum exhibitions.

Is that what's going on here? I don't know. Probably not; I wouldn't be surprised if the folks at UC-Santa Cruz are bumbling through this because it's some administrator's pet project. But I can't totally dismiss it, either, because (for however much longer people care about the Dead) the collection could help the university's bottom line, on the off chance they know how to manage it.

Jeff, I guess I see things differently.

I'm less concerned with whether or not all that archiving is a high-skill-requiring endeavor, but whether or not archiving the Grateful Dead is an especially good use of the bucks such archiving evidently will require.

Is there a compelling need that archiving be done now, or, indeed, at all? Given the economy, perhaps the University should consider recalling the sailed ship and returning the archives from whence they came.

Then, revisit the issue of who else might receive that salary. There are many possibilities: a diversity czar; a women's studies faculty member; a GLBT councilor . . . or perhaps a junior faculty position in the chemistry department.

I'm just saying . . .

Why would you want to hire someone to perpetuate the patriarchal discourse of chemistry?

OT: Erin, thought you might enjoy my post "Management Advice from George Eliot" (at my blog, with discussion at the Chicago Boyz link)

Jeff's comments are the norm for this sort of archive, especially if the archive has the normal sort of licensing rights along with it (which it may not, in which case, any licensing fees would go to TGD and not the University).

I would expect that the archive came with an initial donation to cover the archivist for the first year or two, and with continued employment being contingent on the success of the archive.

That is, that the archive is a quasi-commercial endeavor that can be expected to pay for itself and turn a modest profit for the university.

On the other hand, it might be a completely foolish waste. Has anyone gotten a statement from the University?

I'm also curious if this is a customized job opening for a trailing spouse. Living in Santa Cruz is hideously expensive.

Minerva, is it the subject matter you object to? Because I'm genuinely curious to know if you'd feel the same way if the university discovered a cache of previously unknown photos and ephemera pertaining to, say, Abraham Lincoln, and then quickly set about preserving and digitizing the collection knowing full well that they could charge $50 for every use of a photo in a book, $700 for every use on a book cover, and $900 for every use in a TV show or film.

Now, I don't have tremendous faith in the university to do this right, but rather than just respond with "Grateful Dead archive, haw haw haw!" like Jon Stewart did, I'd like to know more about what they plan to do with this pile of bric-a-brac they've acquired. The fact that they've already partnered with the New York Historical Society makes me think they intend to work the collection big-time. In a gloomy economy, monetizing a pop-culture archive strikes me as a straightforward and much less ethically perilous way of bringing dollars into the university than investing in sports or being less choosy about outside research grants.

It's just my personal opinion, of course . . .

But if our donated archive were a newly-discovered cache of Lincoln's papers, rather than the archives of the Grateful Dead, I'd certainly be open spending the bucks on an archivist.

Feel free to disagree!