$1.4 million gift goes to preserve history of UO.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Heather Briston now has a title to go along with the stuffed iguana, commemorative footballs and 115-year-old potpourri she stewards.

Thanks to a $1.4 million endowed gift, Briston is now the Richard and Mary Corrigan Solari University Historian and Archivist. That's a long way of saying she's in charge of the University of Oregon's past.

The gift makes Briston, who's been the UO record keeper for 2 1/2 years, one of the few holders of an endowed archivist position in the United States. Interest earnings from the endowment will cover her salary, freeing up money to hire a technician to handle most of the paperwork chores and let Briston concentrate on bringing the university's past to life.

One of the first things on her agenda is just letting more people know how rich that past is.

"I don't believe in archives as some sort of best-kept secret," said Briston. "It shouldn't be any kind of kept secret at all."

The university archives are contained in nearly 12,000 boxes split between the Baker Downtown Center and the Knight Library. They include everything from the papers of former presidents to the final draft for the "Animal House" screenplay.

The archives have audio tapes of speeches and interviews by famous visitors from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to George Wallace, including one of a young John Kerry freshly returned from his tour in Vietnam and speaking against the war.

Long-ago victories on the gridiron are preserved in footballs thrown for winning touchdowns on forgotten days at Hayward Field; a clutch of potpourri from a graduate still commemorates the class of 1891, its scent more faded than the class photo.

But it's the photographs that Briston enjoys the most.

"We have such an amazingly rich photo collection," she said. "To know that I've got a photo of the first day of school here, that's just wild when you think about it."

What Briston wants now is for more people to be able to share some of that amazement. With the additional time the endowment will buy, she'll be working to fill in gaps in the collection and expand outreach efforts so more people have the opportunity to see how the UO grew and the part it played in area history.

"If you talk to any archivist, we don't collect material just to have it," said the attorney-turned-record keeper. "It does no one, least of all me, any good to just have it sit in the vault. But when I can get people to use it, that's what I'm all about."

That's what a class in the Robert Clark Honors College did this year when they organized the papers of their school's namesake, who was UO president during much of the turbulent anti-war years. The project resulted in a series of papers that compared student attitudes and politics of that era to the current one.

More projects like that should be possible thanks to the Solari gift. The couple are long-time supporters of the university and donated to the library's renovation and expansion, created an endowed library science instructor and provided fellowships for librarians.

Mary Corrigan Solari is a 1946 UO graduate in psychology who grew up in Klamath Falls with a love of books and libraries. She is married to Richard Solari, now the retired president, CEO and chairman of Watsonville, Calif.-based Granite Construction, one of the largest civil engineering companies in the country.

"They are extremely generous people, and they like this library," said Deb Carver, the UO librarian. "Mary wanted to do something that would have the broadest possible impact, so she chose the library."

Briston said very few libraries have endowed archivist positions, and those that do most often are appointed to care for a specific collection rather than the entire archive. With the UO archive as her charge, Briston plans on completing a project to identify and inventory everything in the archives before tackling some of the more esoteric mysteries in the vault.

Like that iguana. "I have no idea why I have a stuffed lizard," she said. "But I have a stuffed lizard."

CAPTION(S):

Heather Briston, the University of Oregon's historian, looks through the school's collection and explains that she doesn't believe that archives must be `some sort of best-kept secret.'