Over its 40 years of existence, the Coquitlam Public Library has built a strong reputation for commitment to the community. We have achieved this by providing many services to our patrons, meeting the changing needs of a diverse society and the needs of a growing community. We started as a small library located in Centennial High School in 1967. We moved into two small branches in 1978, called Ridgeway and Cottonwood. We added a third branch in 1981, called Lincoln.
The idea of bringing the library to the rural population in BC began with a 1927 survey conducted by the Provincial Public Library Commission. The survey's key finding was that large administrative library districts based on cooperation and resource sharing between municipalities and school districts should be created to serve rural communities who could not afford to provide library service on their own.