Senator isn't a Grateful Dead fan

Mention the word "vault" around Deadheads, and they are likely to daydream of colorful dancing bears and the series of live recordings released by the Grateful Dead that come "From the Vault" of the band's concert tapes.

Ask Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., about a vault, and he is likely to say that is where federal money belongs, safe from the wasteful spending of earmarks and frivolous government agencies.

Those two perspectives clashed Monday when Coburn's office released its annual oversight report on government spending, known as "Wastebook 2010: A Guide to Some of the Most Wasteful Government Spending of 2010." A $615,000 federal grant to University of California, Santa Cruz, to digitize the Grateful Dead archive was listed at No. 4 in the report, which identifies 100 examples of "wasteful" spending.

"The No. 1 thing is that it is not a federal responsibility to archive the materials of a rock band," said John Hart, Coburn's director of communications. "If Santa Cruz wants to do that, they can digitize archives of anything they like with their money. The fact is, we have a $14 trillion debt, and we are in danger of going into a far deeper recession. There are thousands of grants and projects like this around federal government."

The UCSC Grateful Dead Archive, announced in 2008, is an extensive collection of thousands of pictures, documents and pieces of memorabilia. The archive also contains band members' journals, paraphernalia related to the band's extensive social network of devoted fans and the group's highly unusual and successful business ventures.

"The archive is of interest to a great deal of people," said Virginia Steel, UCSC librarian. "There is a lot of scholarly interest in the Grateful Dead, whether it's studying the significant role that they played in our culture and society, or their management and how they ran the business."

The grant from the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services [IMLS] was awarded to UCSC so it could use the Grateful Dead Archive to work on a new, innovative, "socially constructed" archiving system.

"The goal of the whole project is to advance archival practice," Steel said. "The goal is not the digitization of the Grateful Dead Archive, but to create a socially constructed archive which allows individuals access to material. Then people can help in the identification of materials and also upload their own relevant materials."

UCSC was one of 51 institutions nationwide that received National Leadership Grants from the IMLS this year totaling nearly $18 million. The UCSC archive initiative was given the special distinction of a National Leadership Project by the institute.

The IMLS is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums, and has a stated mission to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas.

Coburn is a champion of fiscal responsibility, opposing earmarks and unchecked government spending. Last week he voted against the new tax law and compromise on unemployment benefits, among other provisions, because his concerns over deficit spending were not adequately addressed.

A blog from the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation immediately picked up on the report Monday, posting a picture of a guitar-equipped Jerry Garcia next to its entry on wasteful spending, stating that baby boomers should pay for the digital archive "out of their own pockets."

Steel says the focus should be on the benefits of the new archiving system, not the Grateful Dead project specifically.

"The digital archive will have significance in the way it changes how people can view the materials and interact with them," she said. "We are always trying to think about what's best for the public, and how to share the material. Whether it was digitized or not, the archive would be free and public. That is what a library at a public university does."