The keepers of the Grateful Dead's history

The University of California, Santa Cruz has a special collection called the Grateful Dead Archive to celebrate the print and visual culture of the band.Deanne Fitzmaurice for NPR hide caption During this year's Days Between — from Aug.

1 to 9 — NPR Music is publishing a series of stories about what keeps drawing people to the Grateful Dead and how they plan to carry the band's legacy forward.Inside a climate-controlled facility located in a redwood forest just a few miles from the picturesque Central California coast sits a visual history of the life and times of the Grateful Dead.In 2008, a little over a decade after the formal, but by no means spiritual, end of the band, truckloads of archival materials were donated to the University of California, Santa Cruz Library's Special Collections.There are nearly a thousand boxes' worth of flyers, posters, written correspondence and even the original marionettes from the "Touch of Grey" video, displayed on a rotating basis in a big, yellow exhibition space known as Dead Central.The Grateful Dead understood the importance of recording its legacy, and for six decades fans and other musicians have worked to carry that legacy forward, pushing it into new directions.

But along the way, there have been a number of archivists, historians and members of the band's sound crew dedicated to recording and maintaining the band's immense collection of music and memorabilia for generations to come.In revisiting the band's history, you can see the group's collectivist spirit take shape.

Many of the Grateful Dead's archival materials reflect the countercultural and psychedelic aesthetics of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in the 1960s.Deanne Fitzmaurice for NPR hide captio...