An outstanding feature and a great asset to the Gobabeb Training and Research Centre is its library and information unit.
A SADC Centre of Excellence, the Gobabeb Centre Library is a reference library built around the needs of researchers, students and staff working in and around Gobabeb. With ongoing long-term ecological research since 1963 and educational training since 1990, more then 100 scientists and 2000 students a year visit the station. Most of these visitors use the library in various ways.
The Gobabeb Library is the most extensive arid ecology library in sub-Saharan Africa. It is certainly the leading information centre on the Namib Desert, and also includes information on deserts of the world. This information is stored in books, journals and journal offprint publications. It started, however, with its first in-house publications "Scientific Papers of the Namib Desert Research Station" by Dr. Charles Koch, an Austrian entomologist specializing on desert tenebrionid beetles first in the Arabian Deserts and then in the Namib Desert.
The library contains 1780 books, about 30 subscriptions of local and international journals, and more than 18,790 reprints, of which about one tenth relates to research done at Gobabeb. It also contains topographic maps, magazines and videos. The Library holdings are fully computerized.
Due to the high demand for library space a new acquisition was added in 2004 to increase its use and now forms the reading and working room for the library administration and users and visitors to offer better services.
