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.
Pai Hsien-yung, also known as Kenneth Pai, was a professor of Chinese literature at UCSB from 1965 to 1994. “Kenneth...
Wed, Jul 11, 3:27 pm | Special Research Collections
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...
Mon, May 14, 10:55 am | Special Research Collections
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...
Mon, May 14, 10:52 am | Special Research Collections
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...
Fri, Feb 23, 11:32 am | Gifts & Donors, Special Research Collections
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...
Mon, Jan 22, 1:05 pm | Special Research Collections
UC Santa Barbara Library is pleased to announce that the Pacific Pride Foundation has agreed to donate their historical archives to UCSB Library.
The donation by the Pacific Pride Foundation will serve as the cornerstone of the Library’s Special Research Collections LGBTQ+ archive. Since its...
Wed, Nov 8, 3:56 pm | Gifts & Donors
The Music Academy of the West and the UCSB Library have renewed a partnership to preserve and digitize the Academy’s archive of open reel tapes and transfer the organization’s paper archives to the UCSB Library, where they will be available for research, teaching, and personal enjoyment. Located in...
To find Michael and Nan Miller’s home in the Los Angeles area, just look in the driveway for a car with the license plate “OPERETT.”
To say that the Millers are operetta aficionados doesn’t do them justice. The couple’s home was custom-built to hold their massive collection of 60,000 recordings, 10...
Wed, Nov 8, 3:33 pm | Gifts & Donors
Retired U.S. Congresswoman Lois Capps, who first came to the region in 1964 when her husband, Walter Capps, was recruited to join the faculty at UC Santa Barbara, has donated her official papers to the UCSB Library.
“Representing the people of the Central Coast in Congress was the most rewarding...
Wed, Nov 8, 3:27 pm | Gifts & Donors
Virginia L.T. Gardner is a pansy person, even though her initial encounter with the flower wasn’t successful.
The Santa Barbara resident, who grew up in Pennsylvania, came to love gardening as a child because her grandmother had an 18-acre home that included a hillside rock garden, a woodland,...
