Special Research Collections

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.

In the silkscreen print “Rio Por No Llorar” (“I Laugh to Keep from Crying”), Carmen Miranda’s famous fruit-laden headdress demands that you look more closely. Bananas with a Chiquita label are encased in barbed wire. A bunch of grapes is surrounded by skulls and crossbones — a pesticide warning. Above them, a Folger’s coffee can bursts open, and flies hover everywhere.

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 Presidio soldiers planted vineyards to make wine for sacramental and daily use.

Front-page news at UCSB is no longer confined to a printed page you have to hold in your hand.

Now, anyone can go online to read issues of the university’s student newspaper, the Daily Nexus, along with the other UCSB student-produced news publications that preceded it, dating all the way back to 1923 — when, as one issue noted, student fees were $8 per semester.

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 named for the matching — and requisite — Edison phonograph record player fitted with a permanent conical diamond stylus. The discs encompass a range of audio material, from classical, country and ethnic music to comedy monologues and poetry and literature readings.

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 fight for social justice and make the community a better place for everyone.

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 collections for advice, and ended up spending a lot of time at the Library.

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 founding in 1976, the Pacific Pride Foundation (PPF) has played a critical role in the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS and the LGBTQ+ community, both in Santa Barbara County and the coastal communities of California between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

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, 10,000 pieces of sheet music, 9,000 books, 5,000 vocal scores, and numerous posters, programs, postcards, radio broadcasts, and more devoted to operetta and early musical theater.

Allen Cohen, a retired UCSB librarian, is an active member of the Santa Barbara literary and arts scene. He avidly reads, borrows, and collects books; attends concerts and plays; takes classes on chess, Shakespeare, and short stories; participates in book clubs at the public library; admires and collects art (with a focus on student work); and donates generously to the activities he cherishes. The arts and culture, Allen said, “are a significant reason for us to go on living.”