Gifts & Donors

UCSB Reads 2026, the 20th anniversary of UC Santa Barbara's award-winning common book program, culminated on May 7 with a campus appearance by Michelle Zauner.

UCSB Library has named Samuel Liu and Shirley Qui as the recipients of the 2026 Library Award for Undergraduate Research (LAUR). This year’s winners were selected for their deep engagement with Library collections, services and resources, and their ability to produce high-quality, scholarly work. Liu will receive a first-place award of $750 and Qiu a second-place award of $500.

New Exhibition Explores Many Lives of Shakespeare’s Texts

An edited version of this article was published in UC Santa Barbara's The Current.

New Library Exhibition Celebrates 20th Anniversary of UCSB Reads 

UC Santa Barbara Library is celebrating the 20th anniversary of UCSB Reads, the University’s award-winning common book program, with a new exhibition, Creating Community Through Books: 20 Years of UCSB Reads.

This is a slightly edited version of an article that was first published in UC Santa Barbara's The Current. 

UC Santa Barbara Library is celebrating the preservation and digitization of the KEYT Television Archive, a collection documenting more than 60 years of Santa Barbara history and community journalism.

The creative vision behind cinematic landmarks like The Fugitive, Under Siege, and Holes has found a permanent home at UC Santa Barbara. UCSB Library is honored to announce the acquisition of the archives of acclaimed filmmaker Andrew Davis, a major addition to its growing Film & Television Collection that will preserve Davis’s legacy and make it accessible for scholarly research, teaching, and public engagement.

The UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections recently welcomed a deeply personal and historically rich donation from Farrokh Ashti Ashtiani to the U.S. and International History, Politics, Civilization and Cultures Collection. The donation, Ashtiani’s first to UCSB Library, consists of a hand-colored volume of 13th-century Persian poetry, a rare photographic record of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and a family photo album dating back to the Qajar dynasty (1789–1925).

The University of California, Santa Barbara Library recently finalized the processing and digitization of the faculty papers of renowned theoretical physicist and string theorist Joseph Polchinski (1954–2018). The papers offer scholars and enthusiasts unprecedented access to the works of one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

UCSB Library is pleased to announce the recipients of the seventh annual Library Award for Undergraduate Research (LAUR).