Mission
The Community Library brings information, ideas, and individuals together to enhance the cultural life of the community; Our goals are to promote literacy, deepen a sense of place, foster creativity, promote civil discourse, and provide contemplative space.
In 1955, seventeen visionary Ketchum and Sun Valley women founded The Community Library Association as a privately funded, privately governed, non-profit cultural organization. It operates like a traditional public library, but by the intention of our founders, the Library is not dependent on any dedicated tax dollars and is funded through individual donations and revenue from the Gold Mine Stores.
Today, The Community Library serves a critical niche in this rural and remote area of the West. The Library reinvents the notion of what a library can be: It is a multi-faceted educational and cultural nonprofit institution for central Idaho, which includes The Jeanne Rodger Lane Center for Regional History, a museum, the Ernest and Mary Hemingway House and Preserve, and a robust collection of circulating books and digital resources. The Library serves an unusually broad geographical area (far beyond the town of Ketchum).
The Community Library holds more than 127,000 items in its collection and serves more than 100,000 visitors annually. It is proud to offer free library cards to any and all visitors regardless of their home location, which is why we have nearly 15,000 cardholders from the Wood River Valley, every state in the union, and throughout the world. The Library has become a place of many things…a place for lifelong wonder. And it is a place where anyone from anywhere can get a library card for free!
