Xiamen library was founded in 1919, has a history of more than ninety years.  The old library was located at Park Road NO.2, donated by Yang Yiyao, who is an old reader living in HongKong. On March 1, 2007, Xiamen library moved in to its new house in Culture and art center in Xiamen formally. The gross building area of new building of Xiamen Public Library reaches 25,732 m² (Do not contain share usable floor area), with each 6,000m² on upper and lower two layers. And the integrative service of collection, borrowing, reading, checking and inquiry all can be found at this public reading space. There are about 4.27 million books, 11.9 million species of e-book and 155TB Electronic resources in Xiamen library. The characteristic of collection is Minnan local literature.

Xiamen library see "Open all-round, the whole public service, the whole society sharing" as its Service Policy, building a socialized library as idea, humanized equality, free and convenient service as principle, forming an all-sided openly library construction mode in some elements such as construction facilities, collection resources and readers work. And we look forward to providing readers with multi-level, diversified, multiple forms of service, to satisfy various levels of information needs from readers best.

The opening time is the whole year and the library carry out free service. You can enjoy wireless internet in this beautiful house. We also offer you Introduction to touch screen system, reading newspapers system, Self-help books borrowed machine, Self-service Duplicator and Self-help scanner. Some open service measures such as Book borrowing reservation, Phone renew, Online renew and SMS warning return system are waiting for you. Xiamen library sets up some Self-service libraries, which make readers obtain documentary information more convenient and free. In order to enriched the contents of the readers, enhance the connotation of the service, we hold public welfare reading salon, seminar, weekend movie, story-telling session, exhibition and some colorful readers activities all year round. For the sake of guiding the citizens to use the library and playing the social education function of library, our group approach community, school and company to carry out activities. Since 2011, we hold various theme activities about 1110 times yearly, such as exhibition and reading activity. Now Xiamen library has become a comprehensive public library with high degree of domestic open and distinctive features of the service.

Xiamen library adhere to the service at the grass-roots level throughout the year: In order to realize the region public literature information resource sharing and it is committed to building a modern network communication technology. We take the library of Xiamen main library as the center and district library as the backbone, town (street) or village (house) library for the node of the public library service network. At present library (at city and district level) realize general card, loan and return of books, the literature cataloging, co-construction and sharing of digital resources, readers' activities interconnection and interaction.

In 2010, Xiamen library concluded and signed strategic cooperation agreement with China national digital library, has realized “Complete coverage of national digital library in Xiamen”, which effectively improve the service ability of the digital resources in Xiamen. In recent years, Xiamen has had 19 branch libraries and 5 distribution points at Gulangyu, Haicang, Xinlin and Guankou. That means Xiamen public library has preliminary formed the public library service network covers the whole city.

Xiamen library won good social benefits because of the service policy: "Open all-round, the whole public service, the whole society sharing" and socialized management service concept. In 2016, Xiamen received 4.39 million readers, lend out 3.93 million books ，the business indicators ranked among the top national public library and won the national advanced collective culture system, national march eighth red flag collective, national women Wen Minggang, ministry of culture level of honorary titles such as library, Fujian province provincial civilized unit, and was named the national popular science education base, Fujian province social sciences popularization base.