ATWATER -- By UC Merced standards, Bruce Miller is an old-timer.

He's been with the university for close to three years, and he remembers when the campus site still included golf course putting greens and was populated with cows, not construction workers.

Now he's overseeing design and construction of the library, a tricky process combining traditional paper books with information-age technology.

"We don't want students to come in to use it and say, 'Your library is so 2004,'" the lanky Texan said.

The actual building is skeletal, with girders defining its frame. The essence of the library is inside the brains of Miller and Donald Barclay, the assistant librarian.

The two have come up with a library that doesn't fit conventional thinking.

Forget stern-faced librarians shushing students to keep it eerily quiet. Food and drinks will be allowed. And cell phones are accepted as a part of campus life.

The librarians want noise, interaction, chatter.

"We'll probably even put a toddler reading room in," said Barclay, who was hired a year ago. "A lot of students have kids."

To integrate into student life, the first floor of the library will hold the student union and student services offices.

"We're making it a place where you want to meet your friends, take care of student business, work on a project in a collaboration room," Miller said.

Public access

Students will be able to find places to hide away in quiet while reading Kant, but there also will be 60-inch plasma screen television sets playing videos, scrolling sports scores and giving important tips, such as library hours.

"The question is how to connect to an 18-year-old," Miller said.

And there's a bigger purpose. "Our job is to connect students and faculty with information they need, not to turn them into technicians, not to turn them into librarians."

The public will be invited to browse the library and also use its online resources. "Legally, the public can't use the digital resources at home, but they can use them on campus. They just can't check out books," Miller said.

"We want the best of both worlds. We want the classic library feeling, and we want the best of the high-tech world."

Miller has the eclectic personality necessary to combine the old with the new. He's written a handful of books, including co-authoring a now out-of-print title called "Thinking Robots, an Aware Internet and Cyberpunk Librarians."

He guzzles Coca-Cola in the morning and spends evenings listening to "awesome blues guitar stuff" and Texas singers. If you catch him when he's free, he'll talk about his days hanging out with Texas singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker.

He helped the Encyclopedia Britannica when it decided to offer online services, but he has to take a refresher course in cataloging books.

"I haven't done that in 30 years," Miller said. Due to the small staff, everybody in the library will have to know how to do everything, including checking out books and putting them on the shelves.

When they're not going over plans and designs, Miller and Barclay have taken on other projects. The library staff has been scanning a collection of Japanese art in Hanford and loading it onto a computer. It's the first step in creating a UC Merced collection of works, primarily digital, that will be readily available to scholars and the public.

"We're creating digital data which you could use to reproduce high-quality prints," Miller said. The staff also is looking at digitizing some of the works owned by the National Park Service.

Donations coming in

The library has been on the receiving end of materials, too. A private party donated a collection of books on Native Americans, and another gave UC Merced a collection of Basque works.

The campus has a rare Asian music collection that includes some 78-rpm records and an extensive set of 200 volumes on film. Some of the donations are duplicates from other UC campuses.

"We have an absolutely fabulous collection of Russian folklore," Miller said, noting there isn't a major to go with it yet.

"If we build a really awesome collection in some category, we might attract someone here just to study those materials," Miller said.

A library is supposed to have books to loan out; UC Merced has three. They are chemistry reference books, and all are on loan to UC Merced physicist David F. Kelley.

The library will open with about 250,00 volumes and access to every book in the UC library system, a massive collection covering virtually any topic.

"We're not stressing over having a collection of scholarly publications," Miller said. "Today, the vast majority of new publications are online. It's not free, it's electronic."

"The focus is on opening-day majors," Miller said. "Each school is going to add two majors a year, but we don't know what they will be yet. It's going to be a pretty odd-looking collection.

"We will have a lot of books about snow," he said; the university has hired several experts in the field.