Image showing Ballitore, Ireland handwritten in black ink
Research by students at three separate universities on a collection in the UC Santa Barbara Library that hasn’t been studied extensively since the 1970s is gaining attention - and funds - from several prestigious institutions. The Ballitore Project is a collaboration between UCSB, California State...
Historic photo of the exterior of the first Santa Barbara Public Library
In a prime example of inter-library collaboration, the Santa Barbara Public Library (SBPL) recently partnered with the UCSB Library Special Research Collections to preserve more than 3,000 historic photos of Santa Barbara County collected by Santa Barbara native Edson Smith; 104 issues of Santa...
Leslie Leaney coming out of the ocean in a diving suit
In 2018, Leslie Leaney and other members of the Historical Diving Society USA established the Leaney-Brooks Diving History Archive and Endowment at the UCSB Library. Comprised of a collection of rare books, magazines, monographs, and more, Leaney envisions the growing archive as a repository for...
Roger Camp
Roger O. Camp ticks off all of the boxes as a friend of the UC Santa Barbara Library: alumnus (‘67), collection donor, and Legacy Circle member. A longtime supporter of the Library, Camp reached out this spring with an inquiry: “Would the Library be interested in acquiring [his] life’s work as a...
Clip from The Santa Barbara Gazette
The UC Santa Barbara Library has digitized 104 issues of Santa Barbara County’s first newspaper, The Santa Barbara Gazette, making them publicly accessible online. The issues can be viewed via the Library website.  Published in Santa Barbara from May 24, 1855 to May 15, 1857 by W.B. Keep & Co,...
Angel Diaz headshot
The UCSB Library recently welcomed a new curator to oversee its California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA), which houses primary research materials that document the lives and cultures of Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, Chicanx/Latinx, and Indigenous populations throughout the state of...
Mary Heebner
Art power couple Mary Heebner and Macduff Everton have been long-time contributors to Santa Barbara's creative economy. Over the last 30 years, their travels around the world have been the source of inspiration for photojournalism, visual anthropology, papermaking, painting, published books, and...
Macduff Everton
Art power couple Mary Heebner and Macduff Everton have been long-time contributors to Santa Barbara's creative economy. Over the last 30 years, their travels around the world have been the source of inspiration for photojournalism, visual anthropology, papermaking, painting, published books, and...
Shirley Kennedy
Dr. Shirley Kennedy’s motivation to preserve her personal archives began with a flood of rare Southern California rain, which seeped its ruinous way into her materials documenting the 1998 UCSB visit of Regents Scholar Fan Shengqi, a Chinese jazz musician. This loss stung for Dr. Kennedy, a UCSB...
Laura Treat headshot.
Laura Treat joined the UCSB Library in October in a new dual role as the Curator of Moving Image Collections and Librarian for Film & Media Studies. In this position, she fills a variety of needs, overseeing the moving image collections in the Library’s Department of Special Research...

Pages