Special Research Collections

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.

The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library's Performing Arts Collection has recently been enriched by a significant donation from Andrew Farkas, a distinguished librarian, opera scholar, and biographer. With his donation, Farkas created The Enrico Caruso Jr.

The UC Santa Barbara Library is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a generous grant by The Ahmanson Foundation to support the preservation and accessibility of the American Radio Archives (ARA).

UCSB Library has received a collection of first editions and audio recordings by California author and Nobel Prize laureate John Steinbeck (1902–1962). It includes 25 first editions of Steinbeck's major works, including the novels The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and East of Eden as well as important works of nonfiction, such as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Travels with Charley, and America and Americans.

UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections (SRC) is often cited as a source in research papers, album releases, and monographs, but rarely does it appear in films.

Thanks to generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, UC Santa Barbara Library recently completed a project to digitize portions of its historical sound recording collection of recordings made by Columbia Records in Italy between 1923 and 1950. During this golden age of Italian recording, Columbia created approximately 15,000 Italian sound recordings, including opera, popular, jazz, ethnic and film music recordings.