Divinity School Library

The Divinity School Library offers students, faculty, staff, and alumni a wide variety of print and online resources, including more than one hundred databases, and a growing collection of electronic books. Divinity students have easy access to the most relevant databases encompassing Biblical Studies, Church History, Ministerial Studies, and Black Church Studies, a list that is continually growing. Visit the library’s website at library.divinity.duke.edu for information about more services related to research, interlibrary loan, printing, and scanning.

The Divinity School Library contains a collection of more than 470,000 volumes in the fields of religion and related disciplines and affords a wealth of material for the seminary student. An integral part of the university’s library system, which possesses more than 8,500,000 volumes, the Divinity School Library occupies facilities within the Divinity School building. The library currently subscribes to more than 700 religious periodicals, offers study facilities for students in its reading rooms, and houses a reference collection in religion. Although some of the library’s collection is stored off-site, the majority of the collection can still be browsed within the library’s open stacks. The library also contains a doctoral suite, seminar rooms, a reference room, and a variety of seating choices and study spaces.

Staffed by the library director, digitization and technology librarian, reference and circulation librarians, and several student assistants, the Divinity School Library offers a variety of services to assist students in selecting and locating information. The book, electronic, microform, and periodical collections are carefully chosen to support basic coursework as well as advanced research in all major fields of theology and religious studies. The library hosts original digital collections, including the Religion in North Carolina Collection, the American Methodism Collection, and an extensive collection of digital documents relating to the history of Duke Divinity School at divinityarchive.com. It also works collaboratively with the Charles Wesley Society, the Wesleyan Theological Society, and several local churches to make digital content available to researchers and the larger public through the cross-searchable Divinity Archive site.

Divinity students may also use the resources and facilities of all other Duke libraries, including extensive electronic resources, public documents, maps, periodicals, newspapers, microforms, and special collections (within which are one hundred prized ancient Greek manuscripts). Students have access to interlibrary loan services for books and articles, and may arrange to borrow in person from the other libraries of the Triangle Research Library Network (North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and may present their Duke IDs to use the theological library at Shaw University. In-person borrowing for Duke students is also available through the Ivy Plus consortium. Finally, in-person borrowing for Divinity students is available through the Atla Reciprocal Borrowing Program, which includes over 150 theological libraries across the United States and Canada.