Provided herein are compositions, kits and methods for the production of strand-specific cDNA libraries. The compositions, kits and methods utilize properties of double stranded polynucleotides, such as RNA-cDNA duplexes to capture and incorporate a novel sequencing adapter. The methods are useful transcriptome profiling by massive parallel sequence, such as full-length RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) and 3′ tag digital gene expression (DGE).