SAN MARCOS ---- The signage was upside down in certain places, but most everything else was decidedly upbeat as the new Kellogg Library at Cal State San Marcos opened to students Tuesday for the first time.

About 40 people were on the library plaza waiting for the opening. The library staff was there too, inside, waiting for a timer to unlock the automatic glass doors.

When they opened a little after 8 a..m. ---- a glitch had thrown some sort of wrench into the automatic mechanism ---- librarians served as doormen and women, holding open the doors as the rest of the staff broke out in applause.

"It's great," said library Dean Marion Reid later that afternoon. "It's wonderful to see people in this space. It's just great to be here."

En route to his office, business school Dean Dennis Guseman, who writes a weekly North County Times column, said, "It's as if it's been there 10 years."

Over a cup of coffee from the Starbucks installed at the Kellogg, Pietro Grieco, a student of literature and writing who also teaches the craft in the CSUSM general education sequence, said, "I think that it is a great improvement from the last semester. And I think it's nice that everything's new. The students like new things."

Inside, on the fourth floor, at a corner desk that commanded a sweeping view to the east and north, chemistry major Mary Allen said such spots provide "a breather ... a step back from it all." She added, "Everybody I think is going to enjoy this library."

The day was long awaited. The five-story, $44 million structure, named for long-time CSU benefactors Jean and W. Keith Kellogg II of Rancho Santa Fe, becomes the university's first permanent library. At nearly 200,000 square feet, it has almost seven times the space of the temporary quarters occupied before on two floors of the Craven Hall administration building.

What with thousands of volumes packed away in storage for years, people wandering through the stacks were at last able to see the entire collections in their fields.

The library opened Tuesday as the university welcomed some 6,856 enrollees to campus for the first day of the spring semester. Some 36 fewer students are enrolled than in spring 2003. CSUSM officials said enrollment is expected to grow to 7,027 by the time an official final count is made later in the term. That would be 175 fewer than enrolled in spring 2003.

State budget cuts have led Cal State San Marcos to restrain admissions in an effort to preserve the quality of its academic programs.

As to the library's signage, the words "fire valve" on the steel and glass valve cases were upside down.

Wording on the glass doors urged patrons to "respect your fellow scholars." One way to do that, according to the sign on two of the half-dozen doors at the plaza entrance: Avoid "distrustive" noise. Reid said the word "disruptive" will replace that at no cost to Cal State San Marcos.

Palomar College also launched the spring semester on Tuesday. Officials listed 25,901 opening-day enrollees, a drop of 5 percent from the spring of 2003. For those in credit-granting courses, the enrollment dropped about half of one percent to 22,307, or 124 fewer students than last spring.

Palomar spokeswoman Cindy Sabato said officials there attribute the "minor drop" to the hike in tuition from $11 per credit hour to $18. The increase took effect in fall 2003.

At MiraCosta College, where classes start on Monday, registration so far is about 8 percent ahead of spring 2003. The numbers, according to a college tally: 8,673 signed up now for the coming semester versus 8,034 at this time in 2003.