I just saw this post on Line Out from Trent Moorman and it sounds like a thousand shades of awesome (and the realization of thousands of dreams of local music nerds):

Live recordings from the Crocodile are going to be archived in the University of Washington Library. In 2001, Croc engineer Jim Anderson began recording bands as they played. Now, in conjunction with the UW Ethnomusicology Department and the head of the UW media department John Vallier, some 3000 hours of shows from the Crocodile are set to be preserved forever. There will be something like a dedicated Mac Mini sealed with a mouse and a pair of headphones. People will be able to go Odegaard Undergrad Library, search up a band or a date, and listen to the show. People won’t be able to download or burn the shows for themselves though. They are working on how to protect and index it all now.

The archive is resting in six cardboard boxes, two hard drives, and 300 data DVD’s. Just short two terabytes of data, it’s roughly 3000 hours worth of recordings. If you listened for eight hours a day, it would take about a year to get all the way through.

The entry goes on to quote Anderson as saying "chances are, if you played at the Croc from 2002 on, you’re in there."

It's still unclear when this is going to be completed but I'm sure more details will be forthcoming as it gets closer.

Am I the only one who, while very excited for the audio archives and planning on finding a way into listen to the archives, also wants to take the list of shows archived and a yellow highlighter to keep track of the hundreds of nights I spent at that "indie rock think tank", as Imaginary Liz called it.