Coffee's on, dusty books are out at UMass library

AMHERST -- To its 3 million volumes of books, the personal papers of US Representative Silvio O. Conte, and the works of William Butler Yeats, the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts has added more features: a café, a lounge, and cellphone isolation booths.

With students shunning its 28 stories and opting to conduct research by mouse click, the library is on an outreach offensive, shelving once-forbidding rules and replacing an old circulation counter with a coffee bar, where hot drinks and soda are for sale and an assortment of pastries are on display behind the counter. Chicken wing deliveries are allowed, along with other previously banned activities, like cell phone chatter.

In the place of old furniture, there are now lime green arm chairs and bistro tables. Instead of closing at night, it is open around-the-clock except on weekends.

To Michaela Quill, a sophomore from Clinton, the towering library doesn't seem as daunting as before.

"I went upstairs before; it was so creepy," Quill said, as she munched on a bagel with cream cheese and grape jelly while studying on the first floor. "No one was there."

College libraries all over the country are facing the same battle. Libraries are clearing out books for cafés, tutoring, and career advising, according to the Association of Research Libraries. UMass and four other area colleges are moving a total of 500,000 seldom -read books into an old mountainside military bunker. The University of Texas at Austin has probably gone the farthest, removing all 90,000 books from its undergraduate library in favor of more computers and group study areas.

"There really is a new breed of librarian out there," said Duane Webster, the executive director of the Association of Research Libraries. "There's this notion that since these facilities are in such prominent places on campus, they would be better devoted to people than collections."

In its old form, the Du Bois Library, like many of its contemporaries, had strict rules of conduct that forbade food and drink, and talk was typically frowned upon. But now, conversations are largely unrestricted, except in designated quiet areas on upper floors, and students can take food from the café to a bustling new study area on the garden level, dubbed "The Learning Commons," where reference books and rows of library tables have been cleared out in favor of carrels and computer stations. The library now has wireless Internet access. Vending machines dispense everything from spare computer parts to notebooks, part of a new strategy that aims to keep students in the building by providing for their every need.

The changes appear to be having an impact. With 149,859 people walking into the library last month, use is up 27 percent over October 2005. More students are taking out books as well. Circulation as of June 30, the end of the most recent fiscal year, was up 84 percent to 435,524 from the same time the year before.

Some university librarians say there are good reasons for doing things the old way, and rail against aspects of the new movement, particularly when it comes to food.

"It could be an attraction for pests and mice," said Thomas J. Casserly, head of reference and instructional services at Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University. "We are not a food service facility."

The Du Bois Library opened in June 1973 as one of the tallest buildings in the Pioneer Valley, a monument to the university's academic excellence. But in recent years, director Jay Schafer feared the computer age was near to making the library obsolete. With more than 300 databases -- including those for government documents, 108,000 electronic books. 17,000 digital periodicals, and 58 percent of reserved class readings -- available on their laptops, students had fewer reasons to set foot in the building.

So deserted was the library's bottom floor, an area dedicated to reference books, microfilm, and rows of long study tables, Schafer said, "You could shoot off a cannon and not worry about hitting anyone."

Now it bustles with students. They line up for more than 200 computers. They sit or lie on the floor with their laptops and coffee. They receive coaching at a writing center or tips about a career or a major at an advising booth.

When their computer screens freeze, they can ask an information technology employee behind a counter for assistance. When they need help figuring out legitimate sources in a Google search, they ask the library staff, sometimes by instant message. And when they're worried about being overheard on the phone, they can step inside a cylinder-shaped "cell phone booth" and shut the door .

"Having the resources you need right in front of you helps a lot," said Kirubel Negussu, 22, a senior mechanical engineer major from East Boston. "I come here more than I use to."

Compared with the bustle of the lower floors, the upper floors of the towers have remained much as they were. "It's so nice to study here because it's so quiet," said Sam Giblin, a freshman marketing major from Littleton, while he studied one night on the eighth floor, among rows upon rows of bound periodicals.

Two librarians, convinced that students don't fully understand the extent of the research materials at Du Bois, are holding weekly office hours for the first time this semester in a coffee shop at Thompson Hall, the social sciences building. The librarians put out a sign that says the "Librarian is in" -- an idea they borrowed from a Peanuts comic strip character. Lucy Van Pelt hangs "Psychiatric help 5¢" and "The doctor is in" signs on a lemonade-like stand when the Peanut characters seek advice.

"Sometimes we go and all we get are waves, and other times we have two or three people lined up," said Stephen McGinty, one of the librarians, whose official title is social sciences bibliographer. "It's just a way to personalize the research."

Although Du Bois might be winning the battle, the librarians nevertheless worry about losing the war. Google and Microsoft are working with several leading universities to digitize entire library collections.

Should libraries ever toss out all paper for digital, that could be big trouble for Du Bois. About a third of the library's bookcases , which rise from floor to ceiling, also serve as structural support for the building. The design four decades ago was trumpeted as a way to save on construction costs, but it could leave the library with thousands of empty shelves or a million books with few readers.