The Duke University Libraries are committed to providing top-tier collections and research support for biological sciences disciplines. Our current biological sciences collection is quite broad, with a competitive selection of journals, major eBook packages, and databases, and with particular strengths in evolution, genetics and genomics, and ecology.
Duke Libraries’ collections are essential resources for internationally important biological research organizations, including the Duke Lemur Center and Duke Herbarium, and our primatology and lichenology collections place us among the best academic libraries in the world. In other areas, there is room for additional collection depth, in order to match our Ivy Plus Libraries peers. The Libraries must simultaneously keep pace with information needs in areas of growing interest on campus, such as gene editing, and the explosion of interdisciplinary research involving biological disciplines, represented by entities like the Duke Center for Genomic and Computational Biology (founded in 2014). The current Duke University strategic plan (released September 2017) features a commitment to “build the natural sciences so they can be as distinctive for Duke as are our humanities, social sciences, and professional school programs,” which will place further demands on the library in relation to this growth.
Duke University Libraries seeks to continue our strong support of both established and emerging fields in the biological sciences. Additional funding will enable the Libraries to be more ambitious in building the collection and supporting its use by faculty, students, and researchers.
Establish a collection endowment ($300,000)
New, high quality journals are published each year and existing subscriptions are continually increasing in cost. Meanwhile, monographs remain important and expensive. Many academic libraries, including Duke, are expanding their support of scientific research even further, by providing nontraditional resources such as datasets, electronic lab notebook software, and collections of video lab protocols. A collection endowment focused on the biological sciences, especially one that allowed flexibility among formats, would give the Duke University Libraries greater agility in staying on top of new developments and research trends.
