The Vermilion Public Library had another busy year as its electronic collections continued growing.
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James MacDonald, executive director of the Northern Lights Library system, addressed the Town of Vermilion council on April 7 to provide an overview of the library’s performance throughout 2025.
He pointed out the town is one of 63 communities that are part of the Northern Lights Library System in Alberta’s Northeast.
Throughout the year, the library does more than just get books into people’s hands.
“It’s not just the movement of books. Whether it be our consulting services, the internet, the website, IT support, policy development … there’s a ton that goes on beyond just circulation,” he said.
In 2025, the majority of the circulation was still physical.
“I’ll focus a little bit on the circulation statistics for 2025, which are pretty impressive for your community. (A total of) 7,653 eBooks and E-audio books were circulated in 2025 and 24,685 physical books,” said MacDonald. “People like the audio, eBook stuff, but the physical book is still dominant.”
The library added more than 400 new books to its collection this year. MacDonald noted that ordering through the Northern Lights system provides significant cost savings compared to operating as an independent library.
“Northern Lights purchases about $400,000 of books every year for all of our libraries, so we can command some pretty good discounts,” he said, explaining there’s about $1.2 million in total savings.
Membership in the library system costs the municipality $23,000 annually. Furthermore, because the county is also a member of Northern Lights, the library qualified for a supplementary grant last year.
“Because the County of Vermilion River is a member of the library system, they qualify for the library services grant, and in 2025, your library received direct funding through that $18,333,” he said.
The library boasts a large selection of items in its collection.
“We make sure that you have a good, solid new collection,” said MacDonald. “Your residents have access to over 3.5 million physical library items through our partnership in TRAC (The Regional Automation Consortium).”
New to the library this year is an expanded suite of digital services and online resources.
“We added The Athletic, which is an electronic magazine,” he said. “We added Transparent Language, which is like Duolingo, a language learning app.”
MacDonald explained another benefit of Transparent Language is its inclusion of the Cree language.
According to MacDonald, the wait time for some popular electronic material can be quite long, something they’ve been working to remedy.
“It’s a one-license-one-hold kind of model, usually,” he said. “So, we have a number of all-access collections. We have all access romance, mystery and comics.”
People with a library card can now access a new streaming service called Kanopy.
“At the end of 2025, we added a cool new resource called Kanopy. This is a digital media streaming service, focused mostly on documentaries,” he said. “It’s like Netflix. You can get this on your smart television or download it on your phone, or right on your TV in your living room.”
MacDonald reported that the library system is still doing well, although advocacy with the provincial government has been difficult.
“The last time we got some funding (from the province) was in 2023, the time before that was 2015,” he said. “So, we’ve formulated a coalition of Alberta Public Libraries and we’ve been advocating.
“We’ve had revolutions before RMA (Rural Municipalities of Alberta) and ABMunis (Alberta Municipalities), both of which passed. We’re hoping the province will hear the need.”
In terms of user demographics for Vermilion’s library, roughly half of all users are between the ages of 35-48.
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