Contact: Robert Voelker-Morris, (541) 346-3987, rmorris1@uoregon.edu *Date: October 22, 2003

Source: Patty Krier, MNH Director of Programs, (541) 346-3024, pkrier@uoregon.edu

Museum, libraries will preserve 70 years of Pacific Northwest photos, sounds

EUGENE- As a teenager in Oregon, Don Hunter, began collecting sounds. He would stand beside train tracks with recording equipment to capture the noisy rhythm of a steam engine or piercing train whistles. Later, he used a camera to assemble scenes of Oregon's grandeur-from the High Desert to the snowstorm of 1968. His sound archives and photographs are perfectly preserved remnants of an age long past.

Now Hunter will see his works preserved for all Oregonians thanks to a federal grant awarded to the University of Oregon Libraries and the Museum of Natural History. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a federal grant-making agency, gave a $240,894 National Leadership Grant to support the project.

Hunter, the founder and first director of the University of Oregon Audio-Visual Media Center, has been recording Pacific Northwest history with his microphone and camera for 70 years.

At 89 , he still performs spectacular multi-screen presentations that combine slide shows of his photographs with narration and the sounds he has collected over many decades. Because Hunter spent years perfecting the technical components of his presentations, they have become unique expressions of art.

The federal grant will fund a museum-libraries collaboration to archive nine of Hunter's three-screen, multi-projector presentations onto DVD. All Oregon middle and high schools will receive copies of the discs.

Presentations that will be digitally archived include:

"The Sandal and the Cave," which documents archaeologist Dr. Luther Cressman's research on Oregon Great Basin's earliest inhabitants and the world's oldest shoes - 10,000-year-old sagebrush sandals; "Mt. St. Helens and the Volcanic Cascades," a dynamic presentation of the Pacific Northwest's volcanic region, with the voice and photos of Harry Truman, the hermit of the mountain and "The Pageant Years," a historical look at Eugene and University of Oregon pageants, which were precursors to the Eugene Celebration.

The University of Oregon collaboration is one of only 16 projects nationwide that IMLS selected for National Leadership Grants this year.

Author: Kelly Stewart

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