With plans to retire in the fall, Ms. Tippet began organizing the material this year. “It was sometimes emotionally hard,” she said. “But I wanted to do it because he was a very important person in my life and I loved him very much.”

She doesn’t expect to get much, if any, money from the archive but hopes it can be donated to a ballet group that will preserve it for future dancers.

The second step is to make sure the archive is preserved properly. Mrs. Bernard hired Rick Schmidlin, a film producer who has worked on the archives of The Doors and the filmmaker Erich von Stroheim, to organize her son’s paintings and drawings. It cost her about $3,000 for eight days of his time and travel expenses, but the work is now stored in the proper folders and at the right temperature.

Ms. Smith said her archivist charged her $25 an hour.

Ms. Cohen said there were ways to preserve an archive for less money, including doing a lot of the cataloging and photography yourself. “The budget is not what’s going to drive things, but understanding the breadth of the estate,” she said.

Of course, a big question with any estate is its value. Is there one, and if so how can heirs best manage the sale of works? This area is challenging.

“When you have an estate that is valuable, either generated by a family member or inherited, there is a proclivity to group the materials and sell them quickly,” Ms. Cohen said. “You want to close the estate. There are many cases where the value of the artists’ estates are eroded because too many pieces are being sold at once.”

Berta Walker, who owns an art gallery in Provincetown, Mass., and has worked with many estates, said heirs needed to be patient and find the right representative. “The first thing I’d advise anyone is to find out what the area of expertise is,” Ms. Walker said. “If you’re trying to sell a California artist, probably coming to Provincetown is not going to be useful.”