Humanities

When Samuel Liu noticed workplace friction among fellow Resident Assistants (RAs) at UC Santa Barbara’s San Nicolas Residence Hall, he decided to investigate. As a senior majoring in Communication and Sociology, Liu turned his personal and professional observations into an award-winning independent research project. His study, titled " 'It’s Not Just a Job, It’s Literally My Housing': Resident Assistants, Job Embeddedness, and Dissent," earned first place and a $750 prize at the 2026 Library Award for Undergraduate Research (LAUR).

Generations of researchers who rely on primary sources faced a frustrating hurdle. Conducting original historical research typically required traveling to distant archives, navigating cost-prohibitive interlibrary loans, or adjusting a project’s scope based on access to sources. For students engaged in a senior honors thesis or a graduate seminar, these logistical barriers frequently choked academic curiosity before research even began. As a result, scholarship was often limited to specific geographic locations or well-funded departments.

He is popularly known as the patron saint of the environmental movement, the father of nonviolent resistance and the famously secluded hermit of Walden Pond. But the myth of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) – often conveyed by inspirational quotes on coffee mugs, T-shirts and refrigerator magnets – misses the complex, highly social and fiercely engaged man behind the legend.

In celebration of Open Access Week 2025 (October 20-26), the UCSB Library spoke with Kate McDonald, Associate Professor in the History Department, about publishing her book Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan open access.

The UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections recently welcomed a deeply personal and historically rich donation from Farrokh Ashti Ashtiani to the U.S. and International History, Politics, Civilization and Cultures Collection. The donation, Ashtiani’s first to UCSB Library, consists of a hand-colored volume of 13th-century Persian poetry, a rare photographic record of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and a family photo album dating back to the Qajar dynasty (1789–1925).

The UC Santa Barbara Library is excited to announce the recent acquisition of the Paul Georg von Möllendorff Chinese Cylinders, a collection of wax cylinders widely considered to be the first audio recordings from China. The cylinders, recorded in the late 1800s by linguist Möllendorff, contain sixteen recitations of a popular, celebrated poem "Returning Home"' by Tao Yuanming. Möllendorff recorded the poem in various Chinese dialects to document the differences in regional languages at the time.

UCSB Library recently acquired the archives of Marilyn F. (Dillard) Solomon as a notable addition to the Film & Television Collection. Solomon was a pioneer in local commercial television broadcasting, covering issues of interest that were traditionally marginalized in local media, including civic and governmental affairs, international events, and multiracial relations. She was raised in Detroit, Michigan, by parents Ernest C. and Jessie M.

The UC Santa Barbara Library’s recorded sound collections are vast and diverse: they include over 400,000 recordings representing voices throughout history, from intimate home recordings from the 1890s, to rare commercial recordings on wax cylinders and 78 rpm discs, to unique radio broadcasts. Thanks to a generous donation by alumni Mark Maxson ‘75 and Mary Burchill ‘76, the collection now includes a unique set of recordings made by California author and Nobel Prize laureate John Steinbeck (1902–1962).

On January 1, 2022, an estimated 400,000 pre-1923 sound recordings formerly restricted through copyright entered the public domain, thanks to the passing of the Music Modernization Act (MMA). 

The UC Santa Barbara Library had already digitally preserved over 60,000 of these recordings from its Performing Arts Collection, and now those recordings are freely accessible to anyone, for any purpose, in high-resolution formats. 

The Grammy Museum Foundation issued a $10,000 grant to the UC Santa Barbara Library to preserve, digitize, and make accessible a portion of the groundbreaking radio broadcasts of the CBS Symphony conducted by Bernard Herrmann in the 1930s and 1940s.