SAN FRANCISCO -- Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir offered some strong advice Thursday to the UC Santa Cruz archivists who will take in truckloads of the legendary rock band's memorabilia this summer: "I suggest you don't lick any of the letters."

Inside the famed Poster Room of the Fillmore Auditorium, where the Grateful Dead played 51 shows, Weir and drummer Mickey Hart explained why they chose UCSC over two competitors to host the giant 43-year repository of love letters, ticket stubs, art and other gifts from fans all over the world. The collection will include rare photographs and awards, but not original music.

Weir, 60, confirmed during Thursday's press conference with Chancellor George Blumenthal that band mates "dated" UC Berkeley and Stanford University, but decided to propose marriage to UCSC "because they seemed more excited, more organized."

The band mates said the other schools did not seem prepared to take custody of what is believe to be rock 'n' roll's largest collection of fan memorabilia for one band.

"These folks seemed more anxious, more focused," Weir said of UCSC librarians.

Hart, 64, said the band dug UCSC's idea of placing the collection of recorded interviews, press clippings and stage backdrops at McHenry Library -- as well as a corresponding digital archive -- where Deadheads and researchers can learn, interact, reminisce. Sharing music, after

all, has been the band's signature tune for more than four decades.

"You're repatriating this information to the people who spawned us," he said. "They really got us. They know who we are."

Weir and Hart said the time was now to hand over the collection to professionals.

"There's a shelf life to all media," Hart said. "You have to preserve it before it turns to dust."

Besides, Weir said, "All of this stuff doesn't belong to us. It belongs to the people who spawned us."

Though the band and UCSC had agreed to keep mum until Thursday, news leaked Wednesday of the arrangement for UCSC to preserve mementos that fill a 2,000-square-foot warehouse and display them in a 50-by-20-foot room to be called "Dead Central."

After months of talks, media outlets began sniffing around after word of the deal emerged. A campus bookstore began advertising Dead T-shirts too early Tuesday, and was instructed to pull back.

"It seems this wasn't the best kept secret in the world," Blumenthal said.

An astrophysicist who appropriately received an out-of-this-world tie-dye shirt and tie, Blumenthal called on lyrics from Dead hits "I Need a Miracle" and "Deal" to describe how the campus feels.

"We got our miracle," Blumenthal said. "It brings us great pride."

UCSC and the Dead, both founded in 1965, have a long history and many connections. Professor Frederic Lieberman, who has written two books with Hart, offers a course in the band's history. The campus has for 10 years hosted researcher David Dodd's annotated collection of Dead lyrics. Many UCSC alumni are affiliated with the band.

The Dead played at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in September 1983 and at what was once The Barn in Scotts Valley in the mid-'60s. Deadheads were regulars in Santa Cruz for years. Legendary guitarist Jerry Garcia spent his childhood summers in Lompico with his grandparents. It's where he lost his middle finger at the age of 4 to the swing of his brother's ax.

But ultimately, it was a shared philosophy that sealed the deal to house the archives. UCSC is a "seat of neo-Bohemian culture that we're a facet of," Weir said. "There could not have been a cozier place for this collection to land."

UCSC hopes to raise $2 million to preserve and maintain the collection and fund an endowment for an archivist.

Lieberman said one of the other schools interested in acquiring the archives asked the Dead to pay them to take the collection.

Lieberman said he was among the first to bring the idea of archiving the memorabilia to UCSC library staff. Lieberman, who will revive his dormant class on the Dead to celebrate the collection's arrival at UCSC, said all the band's priceless material was just sitting in boxes, practically inaccessible.

Christine Bunting, who heads the Special Collections archives, said UCSC will begin preserving and cataloging the Dead's material after the items are moved from a Northern California warehouse this summer.

The library will establish a Web site and take questions via e-mail at grateful@ucsc.edu. In the meantime, librarians will consult with the collection's original keeper and former fan club director, Eileen Law, who began storing the material in a San Rafael closet in the early 1970s.

"If it weren't for her, we wouldn't be here," Hart said. "She was our everything. Archives are really the raw material for history."

Looking conspicuously unlike a Dead fan in a white turtleneck, blue jeans and sparkling white tennis shoes, Law said demurely, "I don't know how I kept it in the closet all that time. This is a dream come true for me. I tried to preserve it as much as I could."

As for how the library will handle the droves of fans who will undoubtedly sojourn for a peek at the collection, Bunting said, "We'll have to wait and see who shows up."

She told reporters the library's revamped lawn would make a perfect resting spot for fans waiting to get in, but Dead members chuckled at the unintended double entendre tangled up in her words.

"We've got a lot of grass outside our new library," she said.

Perfect, indeed.

Contact J.M. Brown at 429-2410 or jbrown@santacruzsentinel.com.