Special Research Collections

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

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 Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation announced last week that UCSB Library won one of two of its Preservation Grants to preserve and make more accessible documents and materials related to the life and career of Astor Piazzolla, a popular Argentine composer of tango and Latin American music.

The Astor Piazzolla Materials are part of the Library’s Edouard Pecourt Collection, housed in the Performing Arts Collection of UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections.

Thomas Edison National Historical Park (TENHP) released 2,400 historic Edison disc sound recordings, digitized and made available online in cooperation with the University of California, Santa Barbara Library Special Research Collections on the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) website at adp.library.ucsb.edu.

On January 1, 2022, an estimated 400,000 sound recordings published before 1923 will enter the public domain thanks to a law passed in 2018. This is significant because, until 2022, no sound recording has entered the public domain due to copyright expiration. 

The UC Santa Barbara Library has already digitally preserved over 60,000 of those recordings from its collection, which will now be freely accessible to anybody, for any purpose, in high-resolution formats. 

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.