Barbara Hays, daughter of Russell Randolph and Adele Hays, was born in San Diego, California in 1930. She moved to the family farm in Black Jack, Kansas in 1935 when her grandfather died, and again to Lawrence, KS with her family in 1939, where she attended high school at Liberty Memorial High School (present-day Lawrence High School) and college at the University of Kansas. She was a member of the Xi Chapter of the Sigma Kappa sorority in 1947-1951 while attending KU and earned her bachelors of science in economics in 1951.

After graduating from KU, Hays moved around and married, eventually earning her masters in library science from the University of North Texas in 1971. She had been working already at the Forth Worth Public Library in community relations from 1965-1971; she was also briefly a reference librarian there before serving as a field consultant and manager of the Statewide Interlibrary Loan Network for the Texas State Library from 1973-1982. She was briefly on a cataloging project at Howard University in the early 1980s and retired as head of the Education ad Psychology Library from the University of California-Los Angeles in 1992.

After retiring, Barbara Duke returned to Lawrence, Kansas, where she is currently living.