The University Library of Southern Denmark (SDUB) is a public library and accessible for everyone. It acts as a knowledge centre for the whole of the Southern region of Denmark and has departments in five cities. Its main users are researchers and students at the University of Southern Denmark but firms, organisations and educational institutions, e.g. upper secondary education schools, are among its users.
The University Library of Southern Denmark gives access to books, journals, newspapers, maps, music scores, microfilm and a large number of electronic resources. The Library has all in all about one and a half million volumes and gives access to about 63.800 electronic journals, 170.000 ebooks and 408 online databases (as os 07/2011). Its collections cover primarily the areas, which are researched and taught in at the University of Southern Denmark but almost all subjects are represented in the library’s collections.
The University Library of Southern Denmark participates moreover in the national library co-operation and is able to provide books obtained from all the research and public libraries in Denmark. The library also co-operates with many foreign partners in order to provide books and journals – in printed and digital form.
The University Library of Southern Denmark has a number of special libraries and a co-operation with Odense University Hospital (OUH). For instance, the Mathematical Library, the Medical Research Library at OUH and the Music Department at the Carl Nielsen Academy of Music Odense (Det Fynske Musikkonservatorium) are all situated in Odense. The latter also houses and administrates the jazz collection of the University Library of Southern Denmark, which is just one of its many special collections.
The University Library of Southern Denmark has many services it can offer its users. For example, course resources pages and substantial library instruction activities, where library users are instructed in information retrieval and study habits.
The library has a number of external co-operations, for example, with Denmark’s Electronic Research Library (DEFF). This has resulted in a range of online tools concerning plagiarism (Stopplagiat.nu), academic information management (UB-testen) and information literacy (BINKO). The last-mentioned tool is open source and can, therefore, be freely used by teaching institutions in order to adapt it to their own students.
SDUB is the result of a merger between the research libraries of the four institutions, Odense University, the Southern Denmark School of Business and Engineering and the South Jutland University Centre, which now constitute The University of Southern Denmark. The merger was effective from the 1st January 1999. In 2006 SDU merged with the Odense University College of Engineering, so that Odense Technical Library became a part of SDUB. The Business School Centre in Slagelse was incorporated into the University of Southern Denmark in the beginning of 2007 and its library became the fifth campus library.