Travelling Librarian - University of North Carolina and Duke University

The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Duke University in Durham are separated by a short bus journey. Although one is a state funded and one a private university the two institutions have for many years co-operated in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, both in terms of academic departments and between libraries. Both libraries have strong collections developed over many years and under their co-operation agreement Duke has a responsibility for research level material covering the English-speaking Caribbean.

One of my reasons for visiting these two libraries was to explore how co-operation in collection worked in practice. I was also interested in seeing digitisation initiatives at UNC and the Haiti Lab at Duke, a multidisciplinary humanities research laboratory bringing together resources, faculty, graduates and undergraduates in one space to develop collaboration and the exchange of ideas, as well as working on projects such as women's rights in Haiti, post traumatic stress, translating and transcribing historic documents, alongside a visiting artist and a project looking at mapping conspiracies and resistance across the Atlantic world.