Gifts & Donors

UC Santa Barbara is the proud home of some of the most cutting edge and prominent research, supported by faculty members who are leaders in their respective fields. In an effort to preserve decades of this institutional knowledge and impact, Special Research Collections (SRC) places particular emphasis on acquiring “faculty papers,” which richly document the careers of our current, retired, and deceased faculty members.

UCSB Library Launches Early Recordings Initiative in Effort to Preserve Last Remaining pre-1903 Sound Recordings

In a race against time, the elements, and eBay, the UC Santa Barbara Library, in collaboration with L.A.-based collector John Levin, has created the Early Recordings Initiative—the first public-private partnership to promote the preservation, digitization, and public access to pre-1903 sound recordings.

UCSB Library is one of 20 organizations that received a 2022 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in April for a Recordings at Risk project. 

Nearly $50,000 is now available for the project, “Preserving America’s Radio Heritage: The Recordings of Variety Show Pioneer Rudy Vallée.”

Arthur Benjamin Rubinstein was an Emmy Award-winning composer and conductor with over 40 years of experience creating scores for film, theater, and concert performances.

To preserve his extensive legacy of musical creativity after his passing in 2018, his daughter Ali Rubinstein and wife Barbara Ferris donated Arthur’s archives to the UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Collection in Spring 2019, where they are being cataloged, preserved, and made accessible for active research.

The Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation issued a $10,000 grant to the UC Santa Barbara Library for the digitization of a portion of the Marcel Nicolle Collection, which consists of more than 1,000 rare 19th-century exhibition catalogs in Western European languages, mostly French. 

The materials are primarily housed in the Library’s Art & Architecture collection and were amassed by Marcel Nicolle (1871-1934), a French journalist, art critic, and museum curator who worked at the Lille museum and the Louvre museum around the turn of the 20th century.  

Around the world, there exist repositories of writings, imagery, and tools that mark the evolution of humankind, but what are the sounds of our shared history?

For the last 35 years, collector John Levin has been amassing a collection of brown wax cylinders--one of our earliest media for recorded sound--to shed light on this question.

Count Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, and vampire pop culture may not seem like obvious areas for scholarly research. However, couple Melinda Hayes, University of Southern California (USC) Rare Books Librarian, and Wayne Shoaf, USC Metadata and Digital Librarian recognized this undervalued collecting area and have spent the last 30 years amassing a fascinating and scholarship-worthy collection of vampire ephemera. Now, this collection will have a new home in the UC Santa Barbara Library’s American Religions Collection.

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. 

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. One hundred of her photographs and a video are presently featured in the online Library exhibit 9/11 RENEWAL/REBIRTH.

In early September 2021, California poet Michael Hannon donated materials surrounding his life’s works to the UC Santa Barbara Library Special Research Collections. Inspired by reflections on religion, philosophy, mortality, and the impermanence of life, Hannon’s poetic journey began in 1960, toward the end of the Beat Generation when New American poetry came to the fore. The acquisition is a notable addition to the Library’s growing literary collection.