Special Research Collections

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.

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.