Though the Grateful Dead were based in the San Francisco Bay area and were closely identified with the psychedelic movement that emerged in the mid-1960s there, Louise Mirrer, president of the historical society, justified the exhibition by referring to the band’s “great New York pedigree.” The Dead first played New York City in June 1967 and went on to perform here more than 150 times, including many shows at the Fillmore East, which Ms. Mirrer called “the band’s home away from home.”

Image A poster for a 1980 Grateful Dead show. The group is the focus of a New-York Historical Society exhibition. Credit... Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Santa Cruz, Grateful Dead Archive

The larger archive at the university, which has received a $615,000 grant from the federal government’s Institute of Museum and Library Services but is looking for additional financing, will have both a physical and an online presence. But even before the archive is fully mounted, the historians, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, musicologists and other academic researchers who make up the growing field known as Grateful Dead Studies are eager to plunge in.

“We’re ecstatic with anticipation,” said Nicholas Meriwether, editor of “All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon” and a historian at the University of South Carolina. “That archive is a remarkable window not just into Haight-Ashbury and the dawn of the modern rock theater, but to all the documentary evidence and heritage of the counterculture and all the issues historians are concerned about in discussing the 1960s.”

The archive was one of the subjects talked about last month when the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus convened in Albuquerque for its 13th annual meeting. In a journal called Dead Letters some of the researchers have also published essays with titles like “The Taoist Perspective in ‘Weather Report Suite,’ ” and “How the Music Played the Band: Grateful Dead Improvisation and Merleau-Ponty.”

“If I were starting out, I’d find the archive to be amazing as a way to bring a fresh eye and new perspective to what happened,” said Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who has been researching the Deadhead phenomenon for more than two decades. “There are millions of projects people could do.”