On D-day minus 1 at the new Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, the librarians' perfectionist tendencies were colliding with the realities of the clock.

After six years of planning, the last mad rush was playing out Thursday, a sprint to complete the last minute touches for today's opening of the first library in the nation to combine the operations of a major city and a university.

At 9 a.m., it's ready-or-not, here-we-go time.

The library staff will greet the first guests en masse for today's ``soft'' opening.

Anticipating this opening has kept the librarians on edge for weeks, even more so than the next big milestone: the grand opening celebration Aug. 16.

Dozens of working groups from the city and university libraries have spent years figuring out how to combine forces at the library. But it wasn't until today that all that planning faced a public test.

``There's a lot of anxiety,'' said Jane Light, San Jose's library director. ``It's the pre-wedding jitters. All the parties in the wedding are exhausted, and the big day is still to come. It's the time you ask, `Is this the right person? Can I get out of it?'

``Well,'' she told the library staff, ``it's too late.''

Despite the doubts there was no time for hand-wringing. Dozens of tasks still needed attention.

A crew raced to mount more than 30 old-fashioned clocks, because state-of-the-art atomic clocks wouldn't all work in the building. Artist Mel Chin, whose pieces reveal themselves in some surprising locations, was still installing a few. The IT team was in a tight race to bring 400-plus computers to life in time.

Lisa Rosenblum, a city librarian, was supervising last-minute additions to the new Web site, which goes live at 9 a.m. today. In between, she sorted through piles of bright green labels that needed affixing to some of the library's 400-plus computers so the public could figure out which computers do what.

``I guess I am not worried,'' Rosenblum said. ``It's going to open. We just want to make sure the public perceives us as a great place to be. I suppose there will be some problems once we open, but they will be immediate, and we will know what they are.''

As Patricia Koopman walked around the second floor, holding a stack of index cards, her lips were silently moving. A volunteer docent, she was timing herself for her first library tour, booked for Saturday. The president of the Rose Garden Friends of the Library group, Koopman has been training since May, attending classes and stuffing herself with information about the new library.

As part of her test run, she was looking for some of the newly installed art pieces.

``It's hard to know where everything is because a lot of it is hidden,'' she said.

Bridget Kowalczyk, one of the library's information competency specialists, was focused farther afield. She was blocking out a detailed schedule for the Guinness Book Read Aloud Challenge. She and five others will attempt to beat an Italian record of continuously reading out loud for more than 53 hours. Their efforts will be open for all to see on streaming video over the Internet, or to hear on campus radio station KSJS.

``It's like a marathon. It really is,'' Kowalczyk said. ``We live here, sleep here and eat here. We only get five-minute bathroom breaks.''

Kowalczyk and her crew will start at 10 a.m. Aug. 13 on the library's second floor. The first reading will be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s ``I Have a Dream'' speech.

The readings will include something for everyone. But Kowalczyk admits she is working hard to accommodate the readers' requests ``because when you read what you love, you know it's going to be good.''