My Burnaby Library Project - Background

To give you an idea about where the Burnaby Public Library branches fit in to the city, here is a comparison of the ages, the square footage and the (numerical) holdings of each of Burnaby's four branches from the latest figures on the Burnaby Public Library's (BPL) website as of for 2009.


CAMERON (opened in 1980)
Size: 5,000 square feet
Cameron items owned: 66,162 (2009) - approx. 8% of Burnaby Public Library's total holdings.

TOMMY DOUGLAS (opened in 2010)
Size: 17,500 square feet
Tommy Douglas items owned: 81,805 (2009) - approx. 11% of Burnaby Public Library's total holdings.

McGILL (opened in 2001)
Branch size: 20,000 square feet
Items owned: 168,583 (2009) - approx. 22% of Burnaby Public Library's total holdings.

BOB PRITTIE (opened in 1991)
Branch size: 61,000 square feet
Items owned: 414,105 (2009) - approx. 56% of Burnaby Public Library's total holdings.


The BPL's 2010 annual report gives these overall figures for 2010, compared to 2009.

Items Borrowed 2010 - 3,982,449; 2009 - 3,798,656
Questions Asked 2010 - 199,995; 2009 - 197,696
In-Person Visits 2010 - 2,012,510; 2009 - 1,897,069

Programs Presented 2010 - 1,217; 2009 - 1,271
Program Attendance 2010 - 44,931; 2009 - 48,365

Items Purchased 2010 - 90,569; 2009 - 93,392
Total Collection 2010 - 751,057; 2009 - 751,204

Visits to www.bpl.bc.ca 2010 - 1,561,562; 2009 - 946,208

Total value of items on loan at any given moment in 2010 - $3.7 million.

And some more facts and figures -

According to the City of Burnaby's website, Burnaby is 98.60 square kilometres (38.07 square miles) big, and it's the third most populated urban area of British Columbia, Canada with an estimated population in 2006 of 202,799.

Vancouver and Surrey are larger. In 2006, Vancouver had an estimated population of 578,000 people, over twice that of Burnaby, although Vancouver's area is not that much bigger, 114.7 sq km (44.3 sq miles) and Vancouver has 22 branch libraries. (Vancouver figures from the City of Vancouver's website.)

From the 2006 census, the top languages identified by Burnaby residents as their mother tongue were:

English - 85,475 - 42.6%
Chinese - 50,645 - 25.2%
Korean - 7,030 - 3.5%
Tagalog - 5,060 - 2.5%
Punjabi - 4,915 - 2.4%
Italian - 4,285 - 2.1%

This is probably very similar to Vancouver where the City says about 49.1 % of residents' first language is English and 25.3% Chinese.

And for good measure, the ages of Burnaby residents in 2006 were given as:

00-14 - 29,845 - 14.7%
15-24 - 28,815 - 14.2%
25-34 - 29,560 - 14.6%
35-44 - 33,120 - 16.3%
45-54 - 31,465 - 15.5%
55-64 - 21,850 - 10.8%
65 and over - 28,135 - 13.9%