In Boston last week to deliver the commencement address at the Berklee College of Music, Jimmy Page, the founder of Led Zeppelin, learned to his surprise that the school had a course in which his guitar licks were minutely analyzed. “They go into all these things and deconstruct them,” he said, “the harmonies and the voicings and the progressions, the arrangements.”

For Mr. Page, who turned 70 in January, the encounter was a reminder not just of his exalted status among guitarists but also of the practical applications of a project that occupied his attention for the better part of the last three years. Track by track, he has been remastering the entire Led Zeppelin catalog of nine studio albums and combing through the group’s archives looking for alternative versions that can illuminate how the band created songs that came to define 1970s rock and influence generations of musicians since.

“I knew it was a long haul, that it would involve hundreds of hours of tape,” he said in an interview in New York on Wednesday. “I had to listen to everything, every bootleg that was out there, too. But it has to be done if you’re going to do something really authoritative. I wanted to be sure this holds up, and I hate to think, if I wasn’t around, what was going to happen.”

The first three records, covering 1968 through 1970, will be released by Rhino Records on June 3, with the rest to follow this year and next, in formats ranging from vinyl to digital. In each case, the original remastered disc is accompanied by another in which songs that are now famous, “Whole Lotta Love” and “Stairway to Heaven” among them, are shown as works in progress. In addition, there are studio jams and live performances, drawn from the original analog tapes.