Special Research Collections

In Fall 2022, the archives of the music and comedy duo Smothers Brothers were donated to the UC Santa Barbara Library’s Performing Arts Collection on behalf of the two brothers, Thomas and Richard Smothers.

Over the last 25 years, Buellton residents Kim and Dean Pananides ‘67,’75 have built a complete collection of first editions of the renowned Trianon Press, a Paris-based publisher of fine art books, which they are donating to the UC Santa Barbara Library Department of Special Research Collections. The new collection will be established as The Dean & Kim Pananides Trianon Press Collection.

UCSB Library is pleased to announce that it is the recipient of a Humanities For All Quick Grant award from California Humanities for the Santa Barbara Community Archiving Project.

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.

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.

In 2018, the Henri Temianka Audio Preservation Lab (the “Lab”) and its supporting endowment, the Henri Temianka Audio Preservation Fund, were established at the UC Santa Barbara Library by Drs. Daniel Temianka and Zeinab Dabbah.

UCSB Library Launches Early Recordings Initiative in Effort to Preserve Last Remaining 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.”