After Laurie Anderson recovered from the initial shock of the death of Lou Reed, her husband, in 2013, she had to decide what to do with his archives — a responsibility she describes as “like a 15-story building falling on me.”

Packed away was a huge collection of paperwork, photographs and recordings — more than 600 hours of demo tapes, concerts and even poetry readings — that spanned most of Reed’s career. He had spoken “not one sentence” about what to do with it all, Ms. Anderson said, and her first instinct was simply to put it all online. But soon she began looking for an institution that could maintain the material properly and also make it accessible to the public.

“I really didn’t want this to disappear into an archive for only people who have white gloves,” Ms. Anderson said in an interview at her office in TriBeCa, a short riverside walk from the home she shared with Reed in the West Village. “I wanted people to see the whole picture.”