Special Research Collections

Mitchell Kriegman, a screenwriter, novelist, director, performer, and producer known for creating the acclaimed Nickelodeon and Disney series, Clarissa Explains it All, Bear in the Big Blue House, and The Book of Pooh, among others, is donating his papers to UC Santa Barbara Library.

“This donation will enhance the Library’s research collections in television, an area of growing interest on campus,” said David Seubert, curator of UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Collection. 

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.

“Tens of thousands of recordings that never made it to CDs or digital services line the shelves of public archives, unheard,” said David Seubert, curator for UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Collection and project director for the newly announced NEH grant. “We’re working to change that.”

​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. 

This work to preserve the earliest commercial form of recorded sound and make it broadly available to download or stream for free wouldn’t be possible without the help of dedicated students like Stewart Engart.

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. 

“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.

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.

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.

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.