The Dunhuang City Library was established in 1979. The new library was fully completed in August 2016 and officially put into use on April 23, 2017. It has a building area of 7,300 square meters and an investment of over 60 million yuan. It has four main floors and one basement floor, with a total of 14 functional areas including the children's area, reading area, borrowing and lending area, book bar, audio-visual reference room, children's 3D digital experience area, seminar room, study room, ancient books reference room, elderly reading area, visually impaired reading area, local literature reference room, lecture hall and information desk. The basement floor is mainly used as a stack room, which is divided into the basic stack room, compact stack room, special collection room for ancient books and other sections. There are 422 reading seats in the library. It has a collection of 287,000 printed books, 10,000 kinds of e-books, more than 200 kinds of e-newspapers and periodicals, and over 4,000 volumes of periodicals.

        In 2018, it was rated as a first-class library in the sixth national evaluation and grading of public libraries at or above the county level. In 2023, it was once again rated as a first-class library in the seventh national evaluation and grading of public libraries at or above the county level. Meanwhile, it was awarded the "National Reading Demonstration Base" by the Library Society of China.
The Dunhuang City Library has always adhered to the purpose of "equality, professionalism, courtesy and high efficiency" and the service concept of "readers first". It sincerely receives readers, leads the national reading, and helps build a scholarly Dunhuang. Up to now, the number of visitors to the library has reached 1.34 million. To change the operation mode of the new library, the government has invested a total of over 3 million yuan to purchase equipment such as the Tuchuang robot, self-service card-issuing machines, self-service book borrowing and returning machines, and book retrieval machines, realizing the automation of library services and fully intelligent management. At present, the city library has established 8 township branches, 1 urban study room, 8 cultural stations, 64 book drifting service points and 58 rural book houses (villages). As a pilot for the construction of the digital library in the whole province, at present, the installation of digital equipment and digital platforms has covered 15 branches including the main library, various towns and villages (communities). Readers can obtain digital resources through previewing, reading, scanning QR codes on mobile devices and other ways to share book resources, better meeting the reading needs of the masses and realizing unified cataloging, resource sharing, inter-library borrowing and returning, and unified management. It has achieved "four breakthroughs" among county-level libraries in the province: breaking through the conventional opening hours, with the daily opening time exceeding 10 hours and also being open to readers at night; breaking through the simple reading mode and being the only county-level library that regularly invites lecturers of the CCTV program "Lecture Room" and famous writers to carry out a series of traditional culture lectures; breaking through the single supply and demand model and being the only library that attempts to integrate cultural services, cultural enjoyment and cultural consumption; effectively extending the opening hours, breaking the record of the number of visitors to county-level libraries in the province and becoming a county-level library with an average daily number of visitors approaching 1,000. According to statistics, the annual number of visitors to the Dunhuang City Library is 200,000, accounting for one-twentieth of the total 4 million visitors to all libraries in the province.

        The Dunhuang City Library takes reading activities as a carrier to promote the high-quality development of national reading. It has effectively innovated service contents, planned and established the Dunhuang Book Friends Club and the Dunhuang Reading Aloud Club, hired reading promoters and recruited volunteers, with the team reaching more than 880 people. It has innovatively set up the "Dunhuang Culture Lecture Room", creating high-end cultural lectures on weekends. It has successively invited professors such as Zhao Yuping, Jin Zhengkun, Fu Xiaofan, Zhao Dongmei and Yang Yu, lecturers of the CCTV program "Lecture Room", to give lectures on traditional culture. It has innovatively created brand reading activities such as "Naked Reading Time", "Readers", "Dunhuang in Books", "Famous Writers' Works Sharing Meeting" and weekend parent-child picture book reading together. The reading promotion activities in the whole library have reached more than 2,300 sessions, with 1.17 million participants, gradually forming a series of brand reading promotion activities that conform to the characteristics of the library. It has explored and carried out the integration of library and school services and actively carried out the activity of "Dunhuang Culture Entering Campus". Taking the reading promotion series activities of "One School, One Book" as a carrier, it gives play to the characteristic advantages of each school, strives to realize the joint construction and sharing of book resources between the public cultural system and the education system, and greatly increases the supply of books as well as reading promotion and guidance. It has carefully created the WeChat official account "Scholarly Dunhuang". Through exploration and innovation in concepts, contents, forms, means and communication methods, it has set up characteristic columns such as "Editors' Book Recommendations", "Readers' Words", "Scholarly Time" (selected photographic works) and "Dunhuang Culture". The influence and dissemination power of the platform have continued to increase. Tencent New Ranking released the annual ranking, and the WeChat official account "Scholarly Dunhuang" ranked sixth among libraries across the country. The Library Society of China's statistics show that it has long ranked first among county-level libraries in Gansu. It has actively created the brand of "A Good Place for the Masses" and regularly screens free movies in the audio-visual hall during holidays. In addition, the library also organizes activities such as reading aloud skills training and sand painting art sharing and experience activities, which have enhanced the communication and interaction among readers and between readers and the library. In the reader satisfaction survey, the satisfaction rate of our library has reached over 90%.