BY DIANE RUSSELL

Students are busily working on laptop computers in an academic library designed specifically for the electronic age and featuring hundreds of computer workstations.

Members of the public are browsing through the row upon row of books, looking for the ones that will provide the information they seek.

Faculty members are obtaining research-related items from the cutting-edge robotic storage and retrieval system.

People are camped out in easy chairs, open books resting on their laps, taking a moment to enjoy the view of nearby mountains.

First-time visitors are stopping as they enter the front doors and pausing to gaze up into the heights of the impressive five-story atrium.

Today, these are the sights Dean of Libraries Ken Marks sees when he walks through UNLV's new $55.3 million Lied Library.

For Marks, these sights are truly a dream come true.

For months and months preceding the Lied's opening in January, Marks walked through the structure on nearly a daily basis, checking and rechecking the innumerable details that go into building and furnishing a 302,000-square-foot library and then readying it for use.

So familiar was he with the details of the library that he could provide a verbal virtual tour of the facility on a moment's notice, walking through the rooms in his imagination and painting vibrant word pictures of how the Lied Library would look someday.

Now those word pictures have been replaced by reality.

What Marks sees today when he walks through the Lied is an academic library featuring cutting-edge technology that he believes will serve the needs of UNLV for the next 30 years or more — a place where the university's students will have access to the very latest library technology, allowing them to use not only the collections physically housed in the Lied, but also linking them to a wide world of electronic data.

What he sees is a major improvement for UNLV students and for the Southern Nevada community.

And what he sees is a facility that he believes ranks among the best.

"In terms of physical plant, the physical facility, the library is one of the best ones in the country," Marks says. "I think this makes a strong statement about the university's commitment to academics. And certainly I think that's been confirmed by the actions that the president and the provost have taken in terms of providing us with additional staff positions and other support."

While the James R. Dickinson Library has done a yeoman's job of serving as the place in Southern Nevada to do academic research for the past 40 years or so, it has been more than stretched to its limits for many years, says Marks, who arrived at UNLV in 1997.

The dramatic entrance of the new Lied Library features an enormous wall of windows that runs the entire height of the five-story atrium.

Built for an age of card catalogs and typewriters, the Dickinson was remodeled and expanded over the years and was adapted to accommodate an era of computers and electronics. But it was a strain for the old, two-building, 160,000-square-foot Dickinson, which first opened as a small one-story facility in 1961.

At UNLV, as at most universities and colleges around the nation, the library staff faced and met many challenges as it worked diligently to try to make the aging physical plant serve the needs of today's student scholars.

At a time when UNLV librarians and administrators were wondering how much longer they would be able to make the library continue to accommodate rapidly changing technological demands, the Lied Foundation Trust, through its trustee, Christina Hixson, offered UNLV $15 million to build a new library — on the condition that the state provide the majority of funding for the project.

The state took the Lied Foundation Trust up on its offer, providing $40.3 million toward the project.

Today, the result is not only a new building, equipped with the latest in library technology, but a new academic hub for the university and for Southern Nevada.

When ground was broken in 1998 for construction of the Lied, UNLV President Carol C. Harter pointed out that a university's library is, in many ways, its heart.

"No other single building is as important to the academic, scholarly endeavor," she said. "The Lied Library will be used by faculty and students, as well as by members of the community, to advance their education and conduct research. With the assistance of Christina Hixson and the Lied Foundation Trust, as well as the unprecedented support of the governor and the Nevada Legislature, we are building a library that will help UNLV reach its goal of attaining national recognition for the quality of its research, creative, and scholarly activities."

Marks says that one of the most valuable aspects of the Lied is that it is designed to handle the needs of scholars — be they students, faculty, or community members — not only now, but well into the future.

"I think one of the hidden assets of the Lied is that it's a building designed for the electronic environment, and it will be years before we have to begin to worry about, 'Are we able to handle the changes in electronic technology?' My guess is that the Lied Library will be sufficient for the campus for maybe 30 years plus. And who knows what the environment 30 years from now is going to be?" Marks asks. "The one thing we can guarantee: It's going to be different from what we've got today."

Getting to "today" wasn't always a smooth path for the Lied Library.

Along the way were a variety of problems — including the discovery of water beneath caliche at the construction site, the discovery of mold in the building caused by water seepage, and the finding that some parts of the building had not been properly designed in terms of their weight-bearing capacities.

But, Marks says, each of those problems was solved during the construction process. And, Marks — who is no stranger to large library construction projects, having overseen the construction and renovation of a 300,000-square-foot library at East Carolina University in North Carolina and having worked on other major library projects — says that problems are to be expected when one is working on such a large project.

"There's no construction project that doesn't have its challenges. It's just the nature of the beast," he says. "The odds are not in your favor that you're going to go through a job without some kind of problem."

But now that the construction problems have been solved and the building is open, let's take a verbal tour, courtesy of Marks, of that new heart of the university known as the Lied Library.

Known as the information commons, this area on the ground floor of the library contains 96 workstations that provide access to a number of electronic services and databases, including the Internet and the on-line catalog.

Designed by Leo A. Daly Architects of Omaha, Neb., and Welles/Pugsley Architects of Las Vegas and built by Tibesar Construction Co., the architecturally interesting building is three stories high on its south side and five on its north side. An enormous atrium rises from the ground floor to the full five-story height.

In addition to the impressive atrium, the feature most likely to catch the attention of those entering the library, Marks says, is the information commons.

"This is a grouping of 96 workstations that are available to any registered library user who comes into the building," he says. "Our community users will be able to get access to the on-line catalog and to the Internet, while students, faculty, and staff can get access to the on-line catalog, the Internet, electronic databases, full-text databases, campus computing resources, and, in some instances, access to multimedia resources."

On the first floor of the south side of the building is the much-talked-about robotic retrieval system, known formally as the Lied Automated Storage and Retrieval (LASR) System, which will be discussed in more detail later in this piece. Nearby is the extended study-café area that seats about 100 people. Marks predicts that this will be one of the most popular spots in the building. UNLV's Teaching Learning Center is also in the same area.

On the north side of the first floor, patrons will find the circulation and reserve area, document delivery, the Collaborative Learning Center, Research and Information (known in days past as Reference), and the media resources area.

On the second floor on the south side of the building are the administrative offices. To the north on the same floor is another Research and Information section, this one containing government publications, bound periodicals from 1992 to the present, the microform collection, and current periodicals.

Upstairs on the third floor are the Honors College, the graduate study area, and the faculty study area. The circulating book collection fills most of floors three through five on the north side. Special Collections also occupies part of the third floor.

"Special Collections contains unique, rare, and difficult-to-find materials about Las Vegas, the gaming industry, Nevada, and the Southwest," Marks explains.

One of the primary ways in which UNLV students will benefit from the new library is in terms of the number of electronic workstations available to them. There are 250 of them — roughly five times the number in the Dickinson Library where demand was so great that students often had difficulty finding an open workstation.

Dean of Libraries Ken Marks, who has overseen the construction of the new library, is delighted that the facility is viewed both as the heart of the campus and as a valued community resource.

A perhaps less obvious improvement for students is the number of places available to sit and study.

"As the Dickinson filled up with collections, seats had to be removed," Marks says. "The result was that there were fewer and fewer places for students and others to study and work. There are several thousand seats in the Lied."

And, the Lied offers many places for group study — something the Dickinson was unable to provide because of its space crunch.

"One of the realities of current teaching approaches in colleges is the expectation that students will work together as groups on class projects," Marks says. "Those groups need places to talk and work together, and we simply have not had those places. But there are about 20 group-study rooms in the Lied Library, and we think they'll be very heavily used."

The new library also boasts a media distribution center through which electronic media, such as videos, can be transmitted into specially equipped group-study rooms, he says. A class studying Hamlet, for example, can request that a particular video version of the play be shown in a reserved group-study room at a given time. The library staff will then broadcast the video into that room without the video ever leaving the media distribution center, he explains, adding that this saves time for both students and staff and saves wear and tear on the materials.

Nearly 900,000 volumes had to be moved into the new library over winter break.

A new piece of equipment that Marks describes as a "godsend" for microfilm users is one that integrates a traditional microfilm reader/printer with a personal computer, allowing users to convert microfilm images to digital ones. The users can then cut and paste, convert the data into E-mail messages, or complete any of several other functions, he says.

Especially for graduate students are a special study area with carrels, tables, and a 20-unit computer lab, and offices for the Graduate Student Association.

And then there is perhaps the most talked about feature of the new library — the Lied Automated Storage and Retrieval (LASR) System.

What the robotic retrieval system does is house little-used materials in a space-saving manner within the library while at the same time making them more readily available to patrons than if those same materials were housed in an off-campus warehouse, Marks says. What the much misunderstood system doesn't do is house the library's regular book collection, he emphasizes.

"Contrary to rumor and opinion, the book collection is not housed in the Lied Automated Storage and Retrieval System. The circulating book collection is on the open stacks where people can browse it; they can hold the books in their hands. They can get direct access to them," Marks says.

"The things that are found in the Lied Automated Storage and Retrieval System are bound journals older than 1992, some old microfiche collections, some government publications, and a number of boxes from Special Collections."

The Lied Automatic Storage and Retrieval (LASR) System houses little-used materials in a readily available, space-saving manner.

When a library patron checks the on-line catalog and the item requested is stored in LASR, an icon appears, indicating that to the patron, Marks explains. The patron then enters some information into the computer, and the request is transmitted to the LASR operator. The operator receives the request and at the same time is told by the computer specifically which of the LASR bins — and even which portion of the individual bin — contains the requested material. Each bin is four-feet long and two-feet wide; the depths vary. The operator then gives the robotic crane a command to fetch the material. The bin is brought to a receiving area, and the operator picks out the requested item.

The whole transaction from request to delivery takes only a few minutes, according to Marks.

"If you are on the fifth floor and request an item, by the time you get down to the LASR window on the first floor, the item should be waiting for you," he says. "If you're a faculty member on campus and you request an item from the library while sitting in your office — which you can do — by the time you get to the library, the item will have been waiting several minutes for you."

The system has worked well at Eastern Michigan University, as well as at California State University at Northridge, where it was the only part of the library to remain usable following the devastating 1994 earthquake, Marks says.

While Marks has found it both frustrating and difficult to try to quell the rumor that the regular circulating book collection would be housed in LASR, he says he understands the concern.

"The claim — and I think it's a legitimate claim — by anybody who's done research is that if you can browse the shelves and take a book off and look at it, even if it's not the one you started out looking for, there's the great likelihood of what is called 'serendipitous discovery,'" he says. "While you're looking for one book, you find another nearby that provides just what you're looking for."

Marks says one of the many positive aspects of the Lied Library is its dedication to serving the public — a goal that Harter mentioned in her comments at the time of the groundbreaking.

Perched above the information commons, the enclosed study areas of the third and fourth floors extend out over the ground floor, offering users a view of the five-story atrium.

One way in which the Lied Library can benefit the community, Marks says, is in the role it can play in the economic diversification effort.

"It's fascinating to be in an academic library in Nevada at a time when there is great concern about the economic development of the state," he says. "I think it's fair to say that if you look at Silicon Valley, if you look at the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, if you look at Route 128 in the Boston area, all of those very dynamic economic growth areas are characterized by superb research libraries. They also happen to be affiliated with superb research universities, but the role that a library plays in economic development is often, I think, completely overlooked. Clearly, access to the most current information has a value. People often forget that. They forget to quantify it because it's difficult to do so. But nevertheless, it's a factor.

"I'd like to think that the Lied Library is going to allow us to have a more important role as a contributor to economic development," Marks says.

Another significant role the Lied can play in terms of being useful to the community is as a place where information can be verified.

"Probably one of the biggest services a library can provide in an academic environment is to assist people in understanding the fact that there is a quality factor to information," he says. "This is particularly true when you look at the Internet because there's an awful lot of bogus information — information that is just flat wrong, incorrect, inaccurate, filled with bias — and librarians are particularly well trained to help people understand how you discern what has value and what doesn't," he says, adding that he hopes the community comes to look upon the Lied as a resource in that area.

"While it's a given that the Lied Library will be the heart of UNLV academic programs, the library has a major role in the community as well," Marks says. "The Lied Library is a community resource providing access to information and knowledge not available elsewhere. Whether it's a high school student, business person, or retiree, the Lied Library can be a resource for all members of the community."