Special Research Collections

In the silkscreen print “Rio Por No Llorar” (“I Laugh to Keep from Crying”), Carmen Miranda’s famous fruit-laden headdress demands that you look more closely. Bananas with a Chiquita label are encased in barbed wire. A bunch of grapes is surrounded by skulls and crossbones — a pesticide warning. Above them, a Folger’s coffee can bursts open, and flies hover everywhere.

Santa Barbara County’s wine business got a big boost in 2004 thanks to a little movie called Sideways but the region had been cultivating grapes long before Paul Giamatti sipped his way through the Santa Ynez Valley. The area’s wine industry goes all the way back to the Mission era when priests and Presidio soldiers planted vineyards to make wine for sacramental and daily use.

Front-page news at UCSB is no longer confined to a printed page you have to hold in your hand.

Now, anyone can go online to read issues of the university’s student newspaper, the Daily Nexus, along with the other UCSB student-produced news publications that preceded it, dating all the way back to 1923 — when, as one issue noted, student fees were $8 per semester.

Henry Ford’s Old Time Dance Orchestra, Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign address and a how-to on sending and receiving Morse code. These are among the thousands of recordings Thomas A. Edison’s record label captured on its “Diamond Discs.”

A novel technology between 1912 and 1929, the discs were so named for the matching — and requisite — Edison phonograph record player fitted with a permanent conical diamond stylus. The discs encompass a range of audio material, from classical, country and ethnic music to comedy monologues and poetry and literature readings.

Shirley Graves Kennedy was a passionate activist, a dedicated educator and a devoted wife and mother. A product of the civil rights movement, the former lecturer in the UC Santa Barbara Department of Black Studies turned her considerable energy toward bringing people together on- and off-campus to fight for social justice and make the community a better place for everyone.

As a history major at UCSB in the 1960s, Kenneth Karmiole liked to hang out in used bookstores.

He often found scholarly books from the 19th century that sold for $1, and wondered why they weren’t worth more. To learn about the academic book business, he sought out UCSB Library’s head of collections for advice, and ended up spending a lot of time at the Library.

UC Santa Barbara Library is pleased to announce that the Pacific Pride Foundation has agreed to donate their historical archives to UCSB Library.

The donation by the Pacific Pride Foundation will serve as the cornerstone of the Library’s Special Research Collections LGBTQ+ archive. Since its founding in 1976, the Pacific Pride Foundation (PPF) has played a critical role in the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS and the LGBTQ+ community, both in Santa Barbara County and the coastal communities of California between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The collection of Lynn Andersen of Bisbee, Arizona, found a new home at the UC Santa Barbara Library last summer. Andersen was a collector of early phonograph recordings and was particularly interested in two-minute wax cylinders, Pathe discs, and foreign recordings. His collection was not huge in size, but had many significant recordings and was expertly curated. In the collection are about 1,200 two-minute cylinders and a similar number of disc recordings. Andersen passed away in November 2015.

In a contentious political environment, it’s comforting to know that some people prefer to argue about Bach.

Cellists from Pablo Casals to Yo-Yo Ma have interpreted and played Johann Sebastian Bach’s six Cello Suites in very different ways, with music scholars analyzing and debating every nuance.

When UCSB student Joanna Hui, a cellist and Bach fan, earned a $750 grant to study Bach’s Cello Suites, she turned to the UCSB Library and its extensive collection of music recordings to actually hear performances of the Suites by famed cellists.

When Sydney Martin sees a World War I soldier wearing a helmet pop up on her computer screen, she thinks about the UCSB Library.

The photograph, in rotation on her computer, is part of an exhibition, “Helmets of the First World War: Battle, Technology, and Culture,” on display in UCSB Library’s Mountain Gallery through June 30.