Campus libraries support teaching and research at the undergraduate and graduate levels in all fields covered by the Department of Psychology as well as the Cognitive Science Program and the UNC-Duke Psychoanalytic Education Program while serving as a resource for the citizens of North Carolina. Collections for psychology probably rank among the top twenty university libraries in the country, with strengths in theory (including its history and development and major thinkers), biological psychology, brain science, cognition and memory, clinical psychology, developmental psychology (including life course/span), educational/school psychology, mental health, psychotherapy (all major types), social psychology, ethnicity/ethnic relations, family and kinship, gender and sex roles, human ecology, methodology and quantitative methods, organizational studies, public policy, race and racism, sexuality, statistics and statistical data (both in print and electronic formats). The libraries acquire English-language books and periodicals (including e-journals) comprehensively as well as seminal works in key European languages and subscribe to the major databases. Because the libraries also support graduate programs in dozens of social and health science fields, resources on related subjects of interest to faculty and students are typically available on campus.

The Walter Royal Davis Library houses the major collections and services for psychology. In addition to comprehensive general and reference collections for all other social science fields, Davis Library also has important specialized resources for psychologist in its geographic information systems service and government information and microforms collections. With the exception of most older government documents and individual titles in large microform collections, nearly all library holdings are in the online catalog. The Media Resources Center, located in the House Undergraduate Library, complements Davis Library with its audiovisual resources.

The Health Sciences Library has the major collections for psychiatry and biomedical subjects of interest to psychologists, while the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science Library Data Archive has one of the oldest and largest collections of machine-readable data in the U.S, offering extensive holdings of census and related political and socio-economic statistics. The Odum Institute also provides assistance in locating and ordering data from other locations such as the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), which stores and distributes data from both individual researchers and many federally funded social science studies and maintains data files previously obtained from ICPSR.

In addition to global collections of more than five million volumes, over four million microforms, nearly two million government documents, hundreds of thousands of audiovisuals, maps and photographs, tens of thousands of print subscriptions, campus libraries offer more than 500 databases and over 40,000 electronic journals.

Duke University libraries possess significant resources in that complement what can be found in campus libraries, especially for the history of psychology and psychiatry. The libraries' membership in the Center for Research Libraries provides users at Carolina with additional collections of specialized materials, particularly foreign dissertations and government publications, books and periodicals not in English, newspapers published abroad, and large microform sets.