Plan of Service

The Library Plan of Service is the Board’s strategic plan and serves as a roadmap for the delivery of library services over a 5-year period.  The Plan is developed through a community needs assessment and includes the goals, strategies and objectives that will guide the Library’s service priorities.   
Lethbridge Public Library Plan of Service, 2022-2026 

Annual Reports

City of Lethbridge Public Library Audited Financial Statements 2022

Statement on Race and Social Equity

On June 10, 2020, the City of Lethbridge Library Board approved an endorsement of the Canadian Urban Libraries Council’s Statement on Race & Social Equity, which reads:  

“As leaders of North America’s public libraries, we are committed to achieving racial and social equity by contributing to a more just society in which all community members can realize their full potential. Our libraries can help achieve true and sustained equity through an intentional, systemic and transformative library-community partnership. Our library systems are working to achieve equity in the communities we serve by: 

• Eliminating racial and social equity barriers in library programs, services, policies and practices 
  
• Creating and maintaining an environment of diversity, inclusion and respect both in our library systems and in all aspects of our community role 
  
• Ensuring that we are reaching and engaging disenfranchised people in the community and helping them express their voice 
  
• Serving as a convener and facilitator of conversations and partnerships to address community challenges  
  
• Being forthright on tough issues that are important to our communities  

Libraries are trusted, venerable and enduring institutions, central to their communities and an essential participant in the movement for racial and social equity.”  

This statement (originally endorsed by the Urban Libraries Council) outlines the important role that public libraries play in advancing racial and social equity. The Board’s motion also requires that Lethbridge Public Library incorporate these principles into our planning and approach to service development, and sign on to the original statement created by the Urban Libraries Council.

You can view the existing signatories here: https://www.urbanlibraries.org/initiatives/statement-on-race-and-social-equity  

History of the Library

In 1911 a City bylaw was passed to establish the Lethbridge Public Library, and a grant from the Carnegie Foundation was secured.  Delayed by an economic downturn and the First World War, the Lethbridge Public Library opened its doors in August 1919.  

The Library was first set up in temporary rooms in the YMCA with a collection of approximately 3,000 books donated by city residents. Within a few months, Hazel Bletcher became the city’s first professional librarian – a position she would hold for more than three decades.  

In 1922, the Carnegie-funded library was finally completed at the south end of Galt Gardens. The Library became a busy place for community meetings and curious minds. In addition to serving local patrons, staff mailed carefully chosen books to rural readers who could not explore the stacks themselves.  

During the Depression years in the 1930s, library usage boomed. A film service and audio-visual collection was added in 1949 and a record collection in 1949. The library also provided access to National Film Board collections, travelling art exhibitions and subscriptions to over 100 magazines. The City added a small extension to the existing facility in 1951. 

By mid-century the Lethbridge Public Library was bursting at the seams with an influx of new residents and a baby boom underway. To meet continuing demand, the Library opened a North Branch in 1956 and a South Branch in 1961.   

These efforts helped secure the Lethbridge Public Library’s place in the community. By 1965 the circulation of adult and children’s books reached an all-time high, putting Lethbridge among the top five centres in Canada for per capita reading. 

After more than fifty years of service, the Carnegie building was repurposed as the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and the Library was given a new home in its present location at 810 5 Avenue, South.  Both branch libraries were closed and the new main branch opened in the downtown in 1974, with a refocused role as a community service centre. Its goals were to promote a lifelong love of learning, an enlightened citizenry, and “the positive use of people’s imaginations”.  Patrons could curl up in comfortable chairs to listen to records or enjoy a host of lectures, performances, art exhibitions, film presentations, author nights and continuing education programs.  
The library also expanded outwards, introducing a Bookmobile in 1985, and the library’s first automated library system was implemented the following year.  In 1992 a 20,000 square foot extension was added on to the original building, and the City of Lethbridge became a founding member of the Chinook Arch Regional Library System – a network of cooperating libraries that greatly enhanced access to library services in southwestern Alberta. With public internet access launched in 1997, librarians took on the role of “cyber-guides” helping users navigate the digital world. 

A partnership between the City, the Library and the two school districts was formed to build a West Lethbridge Multi-Use Centre consisting of a public high school, a campus of the Catholic High School, City run recreational fields and parkland, and a community branch of the Library named The Crossings Branch that opened in 2010.  In 2023, the Crossings Branch Expansion and Enhancement project saw the expansion of the branch into approximately 2,600 square feet of unused space, to meet the needs of the quickly growing west side population, and a city that has grown ten times its size since the library was founded more than a century ago.