Though surrounded by a world of words at the Greater Canonsburg Public Library, on most days, head librarian Lyn Crouse finds herself wrestling with numbers. There are budget reports, state funding forms, circulation numbers, patronage estimates, and, recently, the fund-raising drive to build a new library. Not that numbers are a challenge to Crouse, who has headed the library for nine years. After graduating college with a degree in economics and a minor in mathematics, she worked for a bank and a stock brokerage before making a radical career change at age 39 and becoming a librarian. (She’s probably also the only local librarian who can say she’s made a living of putting people in jail, having worked for as Chief Enforcement Officer for the County’s Domestic Relations Department).

Today, Crouse oversees Canonsburg’s small-but-bustling library, one of the busiest in the county, while looking forward to the day a new library building opens on a plot of land the library owns at the corner of Murdock Street and North Jefferson Avenue. The Library Association began raising money last summer for the $2.5 million, 15,000-square-foot building. We dropped in recently to talk to her about life behind the checkout desk.

What is the biggest misconception people have about the Canonsburg library?
LC: That it’s Canonsburg’s library. We are the Greater Canonsburg Public Library, serving the 28,420 residents of Canonsburg, Cecil and North Strabane.
Anything else?
LC: Well, librarians don’t shush people anymore. At least I don’t. And we don’t all have blue hair and wear sensible shoes.
Who uses this library?
LC: About ten thousand of the twenty-eight thousand residents in our service area. We’ve tried very hard to make the library the civic, social, cultural and educational center of the community. It’s not just a book warehouse. It’s very lifelong-learning oriented. We get moms with their kids for story time, we have an after-school teen program – we were the first public library to have the Accelerated Reader program - and we get the adults, people who are job hunting or who want to use computers. We also have out-of-library programs to reach out to the community, where we do children’s programs and visit senior centers.
What people would you like to see more of?
LC: Cecil Township residents! A lot of them have moved from Allegheny County, and they’re close enough to Bridgeville or South Fayette to use those libraries.
The library today is entirely computerized. Do you miss card catalogs?
LC: No. We had a good time burning them. We threw that sucker straight into the fire and watched it burn. Actually, most of them went into the dumpster, but out back we had [have] a ceremony to celebrate getting rid of the first one. They’ve not been missed. In fact, our circulation has doubled since we’ve been automated.
Is there any particular message the library is trying to get out to the community?
LC: Just the fact that a lot of people are confused and may think that the Greater Canonsburg Public Library isn’t their library. We serve three townships. We also have a great web site and a lot of online databases available to our patrons, stuff they couldn’t afford on their own. We’re the leader in library technology in Washington County.
Let’s get serious for a moment. Aren’t you tired of hearing that singing Perry Como statue every morning when you come to work?
LC: [laughs] I have no comment about Perry Como. We don’t say anything bad about Perry.
Well, we understand that you love it, but does anybody else complain?
LC: Not really, but people who don’t know what it is sometimes come in and say, “What is that singing? What is that music out there?”
Do plans for the new library include a statue of Bobby Vinton out front?
LC: No.

For more information about the Greater Canonsburg Public Library’s Capital Campaign, call Ila Stabile at 724-746-1519 or e-mail ilastabile@aol.com.