Next L.A. / A Look at issues, people and ideas helping to shape the emerging metropolis : Power Books : Driven by technological leaps, libraries are reinventing themselves as user- friendly ports of entry to the information superhighway.

Once upon a time, libraries stored books and librarians preserved them. Patrons were regularly shushed, and the card catalogue, that hulking mass of alphabetized wisdom, imposed order on the stacks.

Today, driven by technological leaps and the much-ballyhooed information explosion, libraries are reinventing themselves, shedding the warehouse model for new roles.

Think of the library of the future as a gateway, a user-friendly port of entry into info-madness; as an electronic intermediary between citizen and government; and as teacher and social engineer, fostering collaboration and training the public to navigate the daunting twists and turns of the information superhighway.

“We are not just curators of a collection anymore,” said Lucy Siefert Wegner, director of USC’s Center for Scholarly Technology, the research and development arm of the campus’s newest library. “We are reaching out and teaching people how to find and filter information for their own needs.”

At USC’s 10-month-old Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library, the traditional red-brick facade belies the high-tech wizardry within. A touch-screen terminal greets patrons in the foyer, cyber-savvy students called “navigation assistants” help others conduct on-line research in the computer-laden Information Commons, and cram sessions are held in “collaborative workrooms” equipped with computer ports that are often booked solid until the wee hours of the morning.

As the main undergraduate library, the Leavey has plenty of books--70,000 volumes and growing--on the upper floors. In fact, much of the way the library functions is conventional and familiar, from the checkout desk to the reading room off the lobby where students still snooze over open texts.

It’s the ground floor where students migrate when they need to write a paper, conduct on-line research or crunch data. Here they find 20 group study rooms and 100 software-rich, CD-ROM equipped, Internet-linked machines. The staff calls them “holistic” computers because they can perform so many tasks. Students mainly call them fantastic.

“This is 100 times better than the traditional way of doing research,” said Gabriel Orosco, 24, a recent graduate who was hunched over a machine with a friend to write a job resume. “You look up your subject and print out the information, rather than hunt through 100 books.”

Help is never far away. Advisers in on-line searching staff the room 24 hours a day during the school year. Walls are lined with how-to sheets, from log-on instructions for three types of computers to explanations of Internet browsing and a panoply of software.

This is the Leavey’s real innovation. Not merely a wired storehouse, it is pioneering the concept of cybrary-- a library committed to teaching students and faculty how to traverse the widening web of information formats.

“We can’t leave technology just to the technoids,” said Leavey director Chris Ferguson. “We want every USC graduate to leave with a set of skills and knowledge that will give them a competitive edge in the workplace and provide them with the tools for lifelong learning.”

Though constrained by leaner budgets and a less techno-friendly clientele, public libraries from East Los Angeles to Santa Monica are wooing the next generation of library users with jukeboxes in homework centers, Internet hookups, electronic catalogues and ATM-style checkouts.

At the Pasadena Public Library, customers can take out a book the old-fashioned way--by standing in line at the circulation desk--or check themselves out by swiping the book’s bar code across a scanning machine. Renewing is as easy as a phone call.

In development is the city’s home on the World Wide Web, the fast-growing multimedia side of the Internet. The Pasadena web page will enable library patrons and electronic visitors to retrieve an array of local information, from lists of Pasadena hotels and businesses to City Council agendas and community news. This system will be launched later this year.

Terminals at the city’s nine library branches and the Villa Parke Community Center now allow public access to a wealth of information about cultural events, clubs and government services.

To keep up with the times, libraries are also creating cyberspace versions of themselves, knitting together useful databases that anyone with a PC and a modem can access, even after library hours.

At the Los Angeles Central Library, the Lummis service (named after Charles Lummis, the former city librarian) is a first step toward a “virtual library,” offering commercial and government databases and library files with information as diverse as the latest White House press releases and analyses of the garment market in Mexico.

It is available on about 90 public computer terminals at the historic Downtown library and eventually will be installed at branches and accessible by modem.

If all this is beginning to sound like a cyberjunkie’s fantasy, though, let’s pause for a reality check.

In an era of shrinking budgets, it is a struggle for public libraries to purchase the technology, much less afford the cost of training customers to use the new info-gizmos. Only about 200 of California’s 1,000 public libraries offer free public Internet access.

At USC’s Leavey Library, the demand for computer time often exceeds the supply, with its 100 machines gridlocked many days until almost midnight. Students desperate for a seat in the Information Commons have nearly come to blows.

Of even greater concern to some librarians is the issue of information licensing fees. Information has become a commodity, and dealing with the field’s emerging second- and third-party brokers is rife with uncertainty and hidden costs.

“Some people think libraries get all this information given to them,” said Dan Strehl, the senior librarian who created Lummis.

Few worry about libraries losing their niche in the information marketplace, however. Because nearly all the information they offer is free, libraries are assured of a steady clientele. And they add value to the information surging through their many ports--whether on-line, digital or print--by organizing, verifying and evaluating its worth.

“Libraries still have a very competitive position,” said Greg Mullen, assistant director of the Santa Monica Public Library, which is about to launch a home page on the World Wide Web.

One big reason for that edge, he said, is that public libraries have their community’s interests at heart.

“Another role of the library is that it can be a source of information on what is local,” Mullen said. “We are the only ones really interested in what goes on right here.”

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THE CYBRARY AT USC

The Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library at USC is the best local example of a library designed for the digital age. Open 24 hours a day for most of the school year, the Leavey Library holds 70,000 books upstairs and an array of high-tech features on the ground floor.

GROUND FLOOR 1. The “information commons,” the high-tech heart of the “cybrary,” has 100 multi-media work stations for doing electronic research, writing papers, exchanging e-mail or cruising the Internet. All of the computers--PCs, Macintoshes and Sun SPARCstations--come with CD-ROM drives and high-speed data lines.

2. “Navigation assistants” help computer-wary students and professors learn to use on-line research sources. “Term paper consultants”--librarians savvy in electronic information retrieval--help map out research strategies.

3. Rooms for group study, sometimes called collaboratories, have data ports where users can plug notebook computers into online resources. Popular with students who prefer working in groups, the rooms are often booked until 3 a.m.

4. Two classrooms are equipped for computer-aided instruction--one with PowerPC Macintosh computers networked together, the other with Sun Microsystems machines. Digitized images from instructors’ computers can be displayed on student monitors or through an overhead projector.

5. A 50-seat auditorium has Macintosh, Windows/DOS and UNIX stations at the instructor’s podium and advanced multimedia equipment.

6. Paper remains vital in the library of the future. About 50,000 pages per month stream from the central printing center.

Other floors house the Center for Scholarly Technology, a reserve service where course materials can be scanned into computers and made available online, and seating for 1,400 users. A poetry room has regular readings intended to preserve a literary soul in the library.

Virtual Libraries:

E-mail ipl@umich.edu for information on the Internet Public Library at the University of Michigan. Or reach on the World Wide Web at https://ipl.sils.umich.edu/

Library of Congress home page on the Web: https://www.loc.gov/ Source: University of Southern California

Research by ELAINE WOO and NONA YATES/Los Angeles Times.