Special Research Collections

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.

UC Santa Barbara Professor Emeritus John Ridland passed away in Santa Barbara on January 29. Professor Ridland taught for over 40 years at UCSB, retiring in 2005. He was one of the founding faculty of the College of Creative Studies and a professor in the English Department, focusing on Robert Frost studies. 

Floyd Norman, who made history in 1956 as the first African-American animator at Disney Studios, returned to his alma mater, Santa Barbara Junior High (SBJH), on Feb. 28 to speak about his successful career at the place it all began.

​Meet Stewart Engart

Since the UCSB Library launched a project in 2002 to record and digitize its Cylinder Audio Archive, the archive has grown to become the largest online collection of downloadable historic sound recordings. 

Floyd Norman - who made history in 1956 by becoming the first African American cartoon animator at Disney Studios - delivered the first installment of his papers to the UC Santa Barbara Library on Sept. 16, which includes mid-1960s 16 mm films, animation materials, cartoon collections, and audio interviews. The materials will be digitized for public use. 

The UC Santa Barbara Library and La Casa de la Raza have reached a new accord that signals another milestone in the preservation of local community history.

At a public reception July 11 at La Casa de la Raza, representatives from the library and from La Casa signed an agreement that will ensure the historical records of this community-based organization will be archived, preserved and made accessible in the library’s Special Research Collections.

“Miraculous little machines,” wrote Henri Temianka in his 1968 essay for The Instrumentalist titled “In Praise of Tape Recorders.” The virtuoso violinist, conductor, teacher, author, and founder of the Paganini Quartet and California Chamber Symphony extolled the devices for their myriad uses: to record lessons, to listen back to (and thus improve) playing, to serve as an ever-ready piano accompaniment, and more.

“I can think of no better investment,” he wrote.

In the UC Santa Barbara Library, two exhibits will revisit the spill — one in-depth, the other through art. The first, “Anguish, Anger and Activism: Legacies of the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill,” will run Monday, Jan. 28, through Sunday, June 16, in the library’s Special Research Collections (Mountain Side, third floor).

Original, handwritten manuscripts by an author who has been called a Nobel Prize contender and compared to Ernest Hemingway are now available for everyone around the world to see.