Humanities

In celebration of Open Access Week 2025 (October 20-26), the UCSB Library spoke with Kate McDonald, Associate Professor in the History Department, about publishing her book Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan open access.

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 UC Santa Barbara Library is excited to announce the recent acquisition of the Paul Georg von Möllendorff Chinese Cylinders, a collection of wax cylinders widely considered to be the first audio recordings from China. The cylinders, recorded in the late 1800s by linguist Möllendorff, contain sixteen recitations of a popular, celebrated poem "Returning Home"' by Tao Yuanming. Möllendorff recorded the poem in various Chinese dialects to document the differences in regional languages at the time.

UCSB Library recently acquired the archives of Marilyn F. (Dillard) Solomon as a notable addition to the Film & Television Collection. Solomon was a pioneer in local commercial television broadcasting, covering issues of interest that were traditionally marginalized in local media, including civic and governmental affairs, international events, and multiracial relations. She was raised in Detroit, Michigan, by parents Ernest C. and Jessie M.

The UC Santa Barbara Library’s recorded sound collections are vast and diverse: they include over 400,000 recordings representing voices throughout history, from intimate home recordings from the 1890s, to rare commercial recordings on wax cylinders and 78 rpm discs, to unique radio broadcasts. Thanks to a generous donation by alumni Mark Maxson ‘75 and Mary Burchill ‘76, the collection now includes a unique set of recordings made by California author and Nobel Prize laureate John Steinbeck (1902–1962).

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 UC Santa Barbara Library had already digitally preserved over 60,000 of these recordings from its Performing Arts Collection, and now those recordings are freely accessible to anyone, for any purpose, in high-resolution formats. 

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. 

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.

Thousands of historic sound recordings held by UCSB Library will soon be freely accessible online thanks to a prestigious $349,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Tens of thousands of recordings that never made it to CDs or digital services line the shelves of public archives, unheard,” said David Seubert, curator for UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Collection and project director for the newly announced NEH grant. “We’re working to change that.”

UCSB Professor Emeritus D. Barton Johnson’s academic biography describes him as “a leading figure of Nabokov studies for many years.”

Zoran Kuzmanovich, president of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, begs to differ.

Johnson “was not a leading figure. He was and still is absolutely the central figure of Nabokov studies over the last four decades,” Kuzmanovich said during a Nabokov symposium at UCSB last year. The event was held in honor of Johnson, a retired Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies professor.