When Angela Edwards was growing up, she lived two blocks away from the library, but after racking up late fees, she wasn’t allowed to take books home. It wasn’t until she was a mother looking to set up a children’s story time in her community of Beaver that she began to see libraries for what they truly were: a sanctuary.
Edwards is now assistant director of the Wasatch County Library. While much about libraries has changed over her 20-year career, they still serve as sanctuaries, particularly in the year of 2025 when many are spending increasingly more time online.
Edwards said that libraries are increasingly becoming third spaces where patrons spend hours instead of doing their business and leaving. She’s seen math tutoring, quilting clubs, job interviews, HOA meetings, self-reliance groups and depositions.
That’s not to say more conventional uses of the library — such as checking out books — aren’t popular as well. The library lent nearly 340,000 items in 2025.
The most checked-out adult fiction books were all published in 2024 or 2025. Historical fiction dominated the top three: “The Women” by Kristin Hannah, “James” by Percival Everett and “The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion” by Beth Brower. Mystery rounded out the top five with “The God of the Woods” by Liz Moore and “Broken Country” by Clare Leslie Hall.
The most popular young adult series were the usual suspects — “The Hunger Games,” “The Twilight Saga” and “Michael Vey” — and also included Jenny Han’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” the latter of which trended earlier this year after the third season of the TV adaptation was released.
“Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” “Harry Potter” and “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” were among the most checked-out junior series, but “The Princess in Black” and “Dragon Masters” snuck in there, too.
Mo Willems swept the picture book category with “The Pigeon Has to Go to School,” “The Pigeon Wants a Puppy” and “The Thank You Book” all in the top three.
The most checked-out nonfiction books were primarily trending self-help books, such as “The Let Them Theory” and “The Anxious Generation,” and also included the ever-popular Dungeons & Dragons “Player’s Handbook.”
The audiobook of “The Let Them Theory” is an Audible exclusive, meaning the library does not have a copy among its collection of over 477,000 eBooks, eMagazines and eAudiobooks. Edwards said audiobook exclusivity is just one symptom of the way reading has changed over the years.
“When those e-materials first started, it was really slow to gain traction or awareness or even the interest in reading a digital book,” she said. Now, it’s “almost impossible to keep up with demand.”
While physical audiobooks have “decreased significantly in usage,” DVDs remain popular in part because not everyone can afford streaming services or Wi-Fi.
The library houses almost 68,000 physical books, audios and movies, as well as items like a camcorder, an outdoor movie projector and even a ghost hunting kit — which seems to always be checked out by some brave soul in search of the paranormal.
The library also outfitted its computer lab this summer after receiving a $35,000 grant from the Library Services and Technology Act. The lab now boasts a device that converts VHS and cassette tapes to digital files, a 3D printer and a Vivid-Pix Memory Station, which allows the user to scan anything from a family photograph to grandma’s old teacup and verbally record the history of each item.
As of mid-December, the Wasatch County Library had been visited 96,136 times this year. Since the library is open six days a week, that rounds out to an average of at least 308 visits per day. The number of library cards issued this year, including reissues, was nearly 1,400.
“I usually do front desk time for two to three hours at a time, and there is not an hour of that time that I don’t give out a new library card,” Edwards said. “So, the growth? We feel it.”
As an independent library instead of a branch of a larger system, the Wasatch County Library faces some challenges in serving our growing community. Hideout residents, for example, are closer to Park City than the library.
“Even though (residents) want (Heber City) to be a small town, change has happened, and it’s here, and we just have to rise to meet it now with our library services,” Edwards said.
Social services remain in high demand. The library’s Snack Shack, which provides free food bags for minors, remains popular, particularly over the summer, when some latchkey kids stay at the library from dawn until dusk.
“When we don’t have (Snack Shack), you see those kids say, ‘There isn’t a snack today?’ … We will send them home with a snack if we can because no one should be hungry,” Edwards said. “That food poverty is really hard to see in a community this large or this wealthy. It shouldn’t happen.”
The library offers everything from visits from therapy dogs to a space for a therapist from Holy Cross ministries to offer free sessions to community members in English or Spanish.
Although the county is certainly growing, the library continues to meet the community’s needs.
When asked what interactions from the year stuck out, Edwards brought up a retired couple. The wife is in too much physical pain to get out of her car, so sometimes, the husband comes in and asks librarians to “make the trek into the stacks” for him. The couple has started using the library’s curbside pickup and OASIS, a service allowing a librarian to deliver books to their house once a week.
“Sometimes he still comes in,” Edwards said. “But it’s been satisfying to know that we could still provide those services, even though they can’t get to us.”
