Santa Barbara Mission-Archive Library, Historical archive library in Santa Barbara, US

The Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library is a research facility housing thousands of documents, photographs, and objects from Franciscan missions across California and Arizona. The materials range from handwritten records to family papers that document economic and social life in early regional history.

Santa Barbara became the headquarters of the Franciscan mission system in Alta California, and records from other missions were gathered and kept there. The original holdings, about 3,000 documents and 1,000 books, were enlarged by Fr. Zephyrin Engelhardt, whose notes from the California archive in San Francisco's Surveyor General office survive because that office was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Damp and mould led to a separate non-profit corporation in 1967.

The archive holds the registers in which Franciscan friars recorded baptisms, marriages and burials at the California missions, including Mission Santa Barbara itself. It also keeps a collection of materials on the Tohono O'odham Indians of Arizona and nineteenth-century oil paintings of the missions by Edwin Deakin.

Plan visits at least one week ahead, as this facility requires appointments to access its collections for research purposes. Remote assistance is available for researchers who cannot visit in person and can submit requests through their online system.

The archive holds the notes Fr. Zephyrin Engelhardt took at the California archive in the Surveyor General's office in San Francisco. That office was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, so his transcripts are often the only surviving record of the documents he read.