The archive will debut from 6 to 9 p.m. in the C.K. and Teresa Tseng Gallery in the east wing of the university's Oviatt Library in the center of campus at 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge.

The event will feature a sampling of the archive's contents such as guitars from the 16th through the 21st centuries. Compositions by legendary guitarists including Andrés Segovia, Vicente Gomez and Laurindo Almeida will be performed by Northridge faculty and students.

"The goal of the event is to demonstrate to all students, research scholars and instrumentalists the kind of rare material that the International Guitar Research Archive owns," said Ron Purcell, Northridge music professor and director of the archive. The photographs, research material and instruments from spanning from the 1800s all are available for research purposes, he said.

The archive was created in the 1980s when collector, teacher and award-winning classical guitarist, Vahdah Olcott-Bickford-Revere. Hoping to keep her collection together, Olcott-Bickford-Revere bequeathed to Cal State Northridge a legacy of American and foreign guitar music prints, journals and correspondence reflecting the history of the guitar in the United States from 1830 to the present.

With additional contributions over the years, the archive has grown to more than 10,000 music print titles, numerous photographs, transcriptions of correspondence and historic guitar periodicals.

Rivaling archives in St. Louis, Austin, New York, Ohio and Colorado, CSUN's guitar archive is one of the most complete collections in the nation, Purcell said.

For more information about the archive, visit the International Guitar Research Archive Web site at http://www.csun.edu/%7Eigra/ or e-mail igra@csun.edu.