— Mention the word “vault” around Deadheads and they will likely
daydream of colorful dancing bears and the series of live recordings
released by the Grateful Dead that come “From the Vault” of the band’s
concert tapes.
Ask Republican Sen.
Oklahoma about a vault, and he is likely to say that is where federal
money belongs, safe from the wasteful spending of earmarks and
frivolous government agencies.
Those two perspectives clashed Monday when Coburn’s
office released its annual oversight report on government spending,
known as “Wastebook 2010: A Guide to Some of the Most Wasteful
Government Spending of 2010.” A
“The No. 1 thing is that it is not a federal responsibility to archive the materials of a rock band,” said
debt, and we are in danger of going into a far deeper recession. There
are thousands of grants and projects like this around federal
government.”
The UCSC Grateful Dead Archive, announced in 2008,
is an extensive collection of thousands of pictures, documents and
pieces of memorabilia. The archive also contains band member journals,
paraphernalia related to the band’s extensive social network of devoted
fans and the group’s highly unusual and successful business ventures.
“The archive is of interest to a great deal of people,” said
UCSC librarian. “There is a lot of scholarly interest in the Grateful
Dead, whether it’s studying the significant role that they played in
our culture and society, or their management and how they ran the
business.”
The grant from the federal
was awarded to UCSC so they could use the Grateful Dead Archive to work
on a new, innovative, “socially constructed” archiving system.
“The goal of the whole project is to advance
archival practice,” Steel said. “The goal is not the digitization of
the Grateful Dead Archive, but to create a socially constructed archive
which allows individuals access to material. Then people can help in
the identification of materials and also upload their own relevant
materials.”
UCSC was one of 51 institutions nationwide that received National Leadership Grants from the IMLS this year totaling nearly
The IMLS is the primary source of federal support
for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums, and has a stated
mission to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to
information and ideas.
Coburn is a champion of fiscal responsibility,
opposing earmarks and unchecked government spending. Last week he voted
against the new tax law and compromise on unemployment benefits, among
other provisions, because his concerns over deficit spending were not
adequately addressed.
A blog from the conservative think tank
should pay for the digital archive “out of their own pockets.”
Steel says the focus should be on the benefits of the new archiving system, and not the Grateful Dead project specifically.
“The digital archive will have significance in the
way it changes how people can view the materials and interact with
them,” she said. “We are always trying to think about what’s best for
the public, and how to share the material. Whether it was digitized or
not, the archive would be free and public. That is what a library at a
public university does.”
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(c) 2010, Santa Cruz Sentinel (Santa Cruz, Calif.).
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