Library Pioneers Electronic Storage : Computers: A new university facility has a minimum of books on its shelves and a maximum number of computer terminals.

The new North Campus Library at Cal State Long Beach is spacious and airy. It has large glass windows and recessed interior lighting, lots of soft chairs and sleek-looking carrels.

What it does not have is many books.

The building, which will be dedicated Tuesday, is designed specifically with computers in mind. Industry experts say the $5-million library is the first major facility they know of that is designed for computers.

There will be 40 computer terminals initially, but one wing eventually may accommodate 300 terminals.

The library will have a token collection of books--fewer than 5,000 volumes--most of them fiction and classics for browsing, said Jordan Scepanski, the university’s director of library and learning resources. “We want it to feel like a library,” he said.

The library “will point the way toward a different way of storing information,” Scepanski said. Some believe it may be the precursor of a time when libraries do not exist as buildings at all, but as electronic computer programs accessible from anywhere, including home.

“We’ve always thought of them as places,” said Linda Knutson, executive director of the national Library and Information Technology Assn., a division of the American Library Assn. in Chicago. “Eventually we’ll get away from those parameters. This is a pioneering step.”

Linked electronically to the university’s larger main library across campus and other information services around the country, the facility’s computers will allow students to search for materials by topic, order them while on line and, in many cases, have them transmitted directly or delivered by courier.

Since 1950, the university has been served by the large traditional library at the top of the hill on the south side of campus. Currently containing about 1,050,000 volumes, the 200,000-square-foot facility has not been significantly expanded in 20 years. Yet during the same period the student population has grown to more than 32,000, use of the library has increased as the size of its collection grew, and the campus has spread down the hill to a northern boundary more than a mile from the main library.

The new 50,000-square-foot library, constructed over the past 18 months, will be more accessible to students whose classes are on the lower campus. Eventually, planners hope, its technology will attract enough students to ease crowded conditions at the main library. And the new library will have room to grow, Scepanski said.

Instead of stacks--the traditional shelves on which library books are stored--the new facility has an entire wing that will eventually accommodate as many as 300 computer terminals. To accomplish that, architects designed the building with wide open spaces and practically no walls.

Sitting at their terminals, students will be able to gain access to off-campus computer information services, of which there are hundreds, for a fee of $3 per 15 minutes of use, a considerable discount from the $30 to $250 per hour they cost the university and other outside users. Computer access to the campus’s main library will be free.

Scepanski said there are plans to increase the volume of printed material that will be available to call up on the screen. The printed material already includes such offerings as the complete works of Shakespeare and song lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Beverly Lynch, dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, said: “This is an experiment. Now we’ll get to see if it works.”

Gov. George Deukmejian is scheduled to attend Tuesday’s dedication ceremony.