Special Research Collections

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. 

UCSB Library is pleased to announce that some of our digitized special collections are now available on the JSTOR platform as part of JSTOR’s Open Community Collections initiative. Over 22,000 items from UCSB Library can be freely browsed and searched at https://www.jstor.org/site/ucsb. These collections include maps, photographs, newspapers, scores, and more. Some key collections are the Joel Conway Flying A Studio Photographs, the Ronald H.

UC Santa Barbara is the proud home of some of the most cutting edge and prominent research, supported by faculty members who are leaders in their respective fields. In an effort to preserve decades of this institutional knowledge and impact, Special Research Collections (SRC) places particular emphasis on acquiring “faculty papers,” which richly document the careers of our current, retired, and deceased faculty members.

In 2018, the Henri Temianka Audio Preservation Lab (the “Lab”) and its supporting endowment, the Henri Temianka Audio Preservation Fund, were established at the UC Santa Barbara Library by Drs. Daniel Temianka and Zeinab Dabbah.

UCSB Library Launches Early Recordings Initiative in Effort to Preserve Last Remaining pre-1903 Sound Recordings

In a race against time, the elements, and eBay, the UC Santa Barbara Library, in collaboration with L.A.-based collector John Levin, has created the Early Recordings Initiative—the first public-private partnership to promote the preservation, digitization, and public access to pre-1903 sound recordings.

UCSB Library is one of 20 organizations that received a 2022 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in April for a Recordings at Risk project. 

Nearly $50,000 is now available for the project, “Preserving America’s Radio Heritage: The Recordings of Variety Show Pioneer Rudy Vallée.”

Arthur Benjamin Rubinstein was an Emmy Award-winning composer and conductor with over 40 years of experience creating scores for film, theater, and concert performances.

To preserve his extensive legacy of musical creativity after his passing in 2018, his daughter Ali Rubinstein and wife Barbara Ferris donated Arthur’s archives to the UCSB Library’s Performing Arts Collection in Spring 2019, where they are being cataloged, preserved, and made accessible for active research.

The Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation announced last week that UCSB Library won one of two of its Preservation Grants to preserve and make more accessible documents and materials related to the life and career of Astor Piazzolla, a popular Argentine composer of tango and Latin American music.

The Astor Piazzolla Materials are part of the Library’s Edouard Pecourt Collection, housed in the Performing Arts Collection of UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections.

Thomas Edison National Historical Park (TENHP) released 2,400 historic Edison disc sound recordings, digitized and made available online in cooperation with the University of California, Santa Barbara Library Special Research Collections on the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) website at adp.library.ucsb.edu.