Collections

On January 1, 2022, an estimated 400,000 pre-1923 sound recordings formerly restricted through copyright entered the public domain, thanks to the passing of the Music Modernization Act (MMA). 

The Grammy Museum Foundation issued a $10,000 grant to the UC Santa Barbara Library to preserve, digitize, and make accessible a portion of the groundbreaking radio broadcasts of the CBS Symphony conducted by Bernard Herrmann in the 1930s and 1940s. 

UCSB Library is pleased to announce that some of our digitized special collections are now available on the JSTOR platform as part of JSTOR’s Open Community Collections initiative. Over 22,000 items from UCSB Library can be freely browsed and searched at https://www.jstor.org/site/ucsb. These collections include maps, photographs, newspapers, scores, and more. Some key collections are the Joel Conway Flying A Studio Photographs, the Ronald H.

UCSB students, faculty, and staff can now enjoy complimentary access to the New York Times online thanks to the UCSB Library’s subscription. With the subscription, explore any and all issues of the New York Times going back to the first issue in 1851. Browse all New York Times produced videos, blogs, newsletters, and subscriber events, and view the newspaper’s International, Spanish, and Chinese editions as well.

The University of California has entered into a two-year transformative open access agreement with SAGE Publishing. The agreement runs from January 1, 2022, to December 31, 2024, and covers open access publishing and reading access to SAGE’s hybrid and fully open access journals. The agreement includes open access publishing of an unlimited number of articles by corresponding authors at all ten UC campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and provides researchers throughout the UC system with expanded reading access to the full portfolio of SAGE journals.

In an effort to preserve government documents and save shelf space while also improving public access to the information, all 10 University of California libraries are working together to create a shared Federal Documents Archive (FedDocArc). UCSB Library recently sent its first deposit of documents to be processed and digitized at the UC Regional Library Facilities.

Thomas Edison National Historical Park (TENHP) released 2,400 historic Edison disc sound recordings, digitized and made available online in cooperation with the University of California, Santa Barbara Library Special Research Collections on the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) website at adp.library.ucsb.edu.

About 2,000 rare early opera recordings, including cylinders and 78 RPMs valued at $300,000, were recently donated to the UCSB Library Special Research Collections Performing Arts Collection to be digitized and made available to the public. 

The collection was donated by Catherine Glaze, who inherited it from her father, Harry Smith Glaze, Jr., who passed away in April. A Stanford-educated chemical engineer by trade, he was an enthusiastic traveler and opera aficionado. 

Each year, the Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Research Fellowship program invites scholars from around the world to apply for a unique one to three months opportunity to pursue research, using primary source materials only available at UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections. 

In 2018, conceptual artist RT Livingston gifted her extensive collection of artwork and related materials to the UC Santa Barbara Library’s Special Research Collections. Livingston’s body of work, primarily inspired by human relationships with the environment, ranges from photography and videography to large-scale installations, painting, and music.