Yet more evidence came out today that studying a rock band can be a legitimate academic pursuit.

Just a few months after the University of Massachusetts played host to a three-day conference on the legacy of the Grateful Dead, the University of California at Santa Cruz is announcing today that it has struck a deal to archive and house thousands of pieces of the band’s memorabilia, collected over three decades of touring.

The collection of photographs, letters, artwork, newspaper clippings, posters, and backstage passes will be blown safely home to the library at UC-Santa Cruz, just 75 miles south of the San Francisco streets where the Dead began its crawl to fame more than 40 years ago.

The items currently fill 2,000 square feet of a warehouse in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, and are valued in the millions of dollars. The band’s surviving members considered donating the trove to such places as Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, but settled on UC-Santa Cruz in part because it agreed to terms allowing the band continued access for future albums and other projects.

UC-Santa Cruz was the institution most “flexible in understanding our contractual needs,” Tim Jorstad, general manager and chief financial officer of Grateful Dead Productions, told The Wall Street Journal.

The university also was helped by the overall culture in and around UC-Santa Cruz, which offers a popular undergraduate course about the Grateful Dead’s music. “Santa Cruz seemed the coziest possible home for it,” one band member, Bob Weir, told The New York Times. —Paul Basken