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...
Wed, Feb 26, 5:35 pm | Gifts & Donors, Library Employees, Special Research Collections, Student Success
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...
Wed, Oct 2, 9:51 am | Gifts & Donors, Special Research Collections
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...
Thu, Apr 4, 11:26 am | 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...
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...
