When Lou Reed died in 2013, he left behind a mountain of material. “But he didn’t leave any instructions about what to do with anything, not one word,” explains his widow, the artist Laurie Anderson, to the Guardian. “He gave them all to me and I didn’t know what to do with it, all of these papers and sounds.”

The result of that conundrum manifested itself in the recently opened Lou Reed Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which aims to preserve the large amount of material Reed left behind, from memorabilia to recordings, for generations to come. It was also designed to keep alive the legacy of Reed, a ravenous creator who was equal parts musician, composer, poet, writer and photographer, and rose to acclaim during both a five-decade long solo career and as frontman for the Velvet Underground.

For Anderson, who first met Reed in 1992 and married him in 2008, it was a project that took her and her team three long years of sifting through boxes of material and digitizing recordings in a calculated way. “I think it’s very tough to hand over boxes to someone and say, ‘Digitize this,’” explains Anderson. “We knew that if we wanted to do it in a way that was really careful, we had to do it ourselves and we spent a long time trying to figure it out.”

A notepad from the Lou Reed Archive. Photograph: Jonathan Blanc/The New York Public Library

The archive consists of everything from handwritten lyrics to a notebook of his favorite restaurants. “This is the daily minutiae of what it meant to be Lou Reed and be a major popular figure,” explained Jonathan Hiam, the music and recorded sound curator at the New York Public Library who oversees the collection. “We have documents pertaining to how much money was paid out to contractors and vendors, to who was managing his tours, as well as candid and professional photographs.”

According to Hiam, a highlight of the archive is a database of hundreds of recordings available to cue up at the library’s kiosks. “Everything from live recordings to studio outtakes, demo recordings and videos, all available to scroll through and enjoy in an instant.” For Anderson, the recordings offer an inside insight into a talent rarely seen. “It’s really a treasure to hear him talking to musicians and what he wants out of them,” she explains of the singer behind seminal tracks such as Walk on the Wild Side and Perfect Day. “What’s so wonderful when you listen to them is you realize his incredible generosity in the studio. He was so good at knowing how he wanted to experiment and pull things out of people.”

The fact that Reed’s archive is in New York City has special significance, considering the rocker would readily be a part of the city’s proverbial musical Mount Rushmore. “Lou Reed as a person and artist was a quintessential New York figure and his work continues to influence the city to some degree,” muses Hiam. “He was also a supporter and lover of the New York Public Library itself. Having his archives viewable for anyone with a library card, which anyone can get, very much speaks to his own aesthetic which embraced all types of people, in particular the marginalized. In many ways, having his archives here was a natural fit.”

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson in 2005. Photograph: Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

For Anderson, the biggest shock of the archive is that those who knew Reed and played with him, are also finding it a rich resource. “His friends are emailing me when they’re in the archive and they can’t believe what they’re listening to, which made me so happy,” she says. “Even people who were close to him are using it, which is astounding. At the same time, it was also very important to me to not put it into a place that was for only scholars. You can be anybody and listen to anything. That’s the spirit of this. It belongs to everybody, and that’s so exciting to me.”

Adding special significance is that this year, Reed’s landmark album New York is celebrating its 30th anniversary. According to Anderson, not only are they planning on marking the milestone, but the Reed Archive is only the start. “We still have other material from him to go through, so the work is continuing, which is wild,” she explains. “When you die and step into history, many people are turned into a cliche since you can’t absorb too much about one’s life. With this archive, you can walk directly into Lou’s world.”