In the spirit of Thanksgiving and a celebration of all things home, what can our local library tell us about the people who live here? Thanks to Draper librarian Linda Gee, we know more about the people in our community because of an activity she’s done each September for the past three years. Gee has engaged visitors by inviting them to answer a question about themselves on a giant poster in the library lobby. Participants respond by placing a small dot sticker in the category that represents their answer.

“After I did the first one, it was so successful, I decided I would do others. All three years, the people have said this is so fun. In some sense, they like to be seen in this little dot,’ Gee said. 

While not a scientific survey by any means, it gives insight into community members who are library patrons. After all, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie famously called libraries “palaces for the people.”

This year’s activity asked “How long have you lived here?” The majority of responses fell in the four-to-nine-year category. Gee shared demographic information about Draper to coincide with each response. Her 2020 fun facts included Draper’s population was 51,017 and the average age of residents was 33.9 while the median home price was $569,450.

Ten to 19 years living in Draper had the second most dots. Gee noted the 2010 population was 42,274 during that time period while the average age was 30.7 and the median home price was $434,450. While the responses Gee got are not scientific by any means, the facts she provided to coincide with each decade were accurate, meaning the median price of a home in Draper increased $100,000 in one decade.

Third place was respondents who indicated they’ve lived in Draper for a short time, just one to three years. Gee was quick to say that maybe that was the response of adults or perhaps the response of children who are less than 4 years of age. “Maybe that’s why we got a lot who’ve lived here for four years or less. Families will stop and they’ll each put their dot on,” Gee said. Facts from 2023 noted the population was 55,400 while the median age was 32.3 and the median home price continued to climb to $665,341. That showed another median home price increase of roughly $100,000 in just three years, from 2020 until 2023.

There were more dots indicating people who’ve lived in Draper for 40 years or more than there were for the 30-39 years category. Those who’ve lived in Draper more than 40 years may recall the population hovered around 5,500 back then. The median home price for that era was $72,700 and the median age was just 25. For the 30-39 years of living in Draper category, Gee’s stats showed population as 7,257 while the median age increased to 30 and median home price was $115,090.

Knowing the Draper library gets visitors from the surrounding area, Gee didn’t want to leave anyone out of the fun. So, she had two additional options under the heading “I don’t live in Draper,” including “I live in Sandy” or “I live elsewhere.” Those categories appeared to get nearly equal responses. Lastly, in addition to the demographic information Gee listed under each decade, she included some historic facts about Draper: The city was established in 1849 and officially incorporated in 1978, the city area covers 30.1 square miles, and Draper has had a full-service library since 1997.

The 2023 question posed by librarian Linda Gee asked visitors to indicate during what era they were born. Even members of the Greatest Generation participated, and Gee provided interesting historic facts under each generation on the giant activity poster she created. (Courtesy Linda Gee)

Last year’s question was “When were you born”? The answers were broken up into categories including the Greatest Generation (born 1901-1924), the Silent Generation (born 1925-1945), Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), Generation X (born 1965-1980), Millennials (born 1981-1996), Generation Z (born 1997-2012) and Generation Alpha (born 2010-2024). The category with the most responses appeared to be Generation Alpha or kids ages 1 to 11; those are the years of the Fidget Spinner introduction, the Covid-19 pandemic, and when Draper celebrated 45 years as a city. Generation Z (which encompassed the arrival of the first Harry Potter book, the Angry Birds video game release and the 2005 opening of the current Draper Library) respondents seemed to be about equal to Millennials using the library (those were the days when Pac Man and Rubik’s Cube debuted, the Berlin Wall fell and the Gulf War began).

“Maybe I thought there would be more Silent Generation,” Gee said. But there were quite a few dots under the Greatest Generation.

The fun all started with Gee’s original activity in 2021 which asked people to indicate where they were born by placing a sticker on a map of the world, a map of the United States, or a map of Utah that included the various counties within the state. “That was very fun because we had pretty much every place represented. We have quite a few patrons from different areas of the world. I wasn’t surprised at that,” Gee said. The grand majority of respondents were born in Utah, particularly Salt Lake County. Every state in the nation had at least one sticker with the exception of West Virginia. Quite a few were from California and neighboring Idaho, but Texas had decent representation as did the Eastern states. The world map showed clusters of stickers for people born in Europe and South America as well as at least one sticker for China, Japan, India and other countries.

Gee delights in watching the reaction of participants each year. “You have strangers talking to each other as they’re reading the facts or putting up their sticker. I should just sit on that bench out there and see what they say. My favorite thing is watching people take pictures of it. For the first one, someone posted a picture of it on Facebook and a librarian from Texas contacted me and asked how I did it. She ended up doing it at her library and then she sent me pictures of her activity,” Gee said.

One thing’s for sure, the library is a place or perhaps a palace for everyone…for people of all ages, from all walks of life. “I think everyone belongs to the palace. I think libraries are vital to the community for helping educate the youth, including getting them reading, and vital to the community for social connection and for people to continue their education,” Gee said.

Gee offered more perspective. “I love the serendipity of the library. You can come in and find something that you didn’t even know you were looking for and you leave happy. I just want people to have fun when they come into the library,” she said.

Gee plans to do the activity again next September, but the question she’ll pose to patrons remains a mystery because she has ideas but she hasn’t yet decided. One thing’s for sure, she’s definitely looking forward to doing the activity again next year.