Thanks Erick. The pre-existing request handler for /browse (the velocity template driven interface) already had this:
<requestHandler name="/browse" class="solr.SearchHandler" useParams="query,facets,velocity,browse"> I just added an entry for "myParams" and added the initParams element in solrconfig.xml. I also tried adding a initParam with a path of /browse (similar to how the existing initParams elements were setup). I was wondering where these param set on the /browse event handler were coming from. Now that I know to look for params.json, I see a copy in my core's conf directory and it has "query", "facets", and "velocity" defined. I'm going to try setting via the parameters api and see what happens... Thanks for the pointers. Matt