Highlights:
The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library received a gift of more than 55,000 comic books, 500 role-playing games, thousands of comic fanzines, science fiction and fantasy fiction materials, and comics posters and art. This is one of the largest archival collections of comics in the U.S.

Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory and author of the bestselling Being Digital, inaugurated the William B. Weaver Memorial Lecture series. The series was established by the library in honor of Weaver, a Duke alumnus and member of the Library Advisory Board.

Awards and recognitions:
The Society of American Archivists selected Duke as the 2002 recipient of its Distinguished Service Award. The society noted that Duke was an early implementer of encoded archival description, which helped to refine the standard, and praised Duke's Digital Scriptorium, part of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, for its leadership over the past decade in developing best practices for online digital collections.

Staff appointments:

• Greta Boers, coordinator of first-year library instruction, from Emory University
• Emily Brassell, web project/production manager for the Digital Library@Duke, from webslingerZ
• Kirstin Dougan, public services librarian at the Music Library, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Ann Elsner, business manager, from the Dal Al-Hekma College for Women in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
• Karen Jean Hunt, director of the John Hope Franklin Collection of African and African-American Documentation, from California State University-Dominguez Hills
• Jill Katte, technical services archivist for the University Archives
• Jim Matthews, systems administrator for Information Technology Services, from KI Networks
• Laura Micham, director of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, from Emory University
• Catherine Morris, head of the accounting section/Acquisitions Department, from Divi Hotels Marketing, Inc.
• Will Sexton, metadata architect/programmer for the Digital Library@Duke, from webslingerZ
• Catherine Shreve, librarian for public policy and political science, from another position in the library system

Statistics:
The Duke University Libraries have combined collections of 5.2 million books, more than 30,000 serials, and additional resources in an array of formats numbering more than 5 million items.

Major gifts:
Gifts from alumni, parents and other friends of the library set a new annual fund record; all gifts to the library totaled $4.9 million.