SAN MARCOS -- Cal State San Marcos threw a party Friday to celebrate its new $44 million library, which has become the focal point of the 15-year-old campus after only a few weeks of operation.

Library benefactors Jean and W. Keith Kellogg of Rancho Santa Fe joined the dean of the library, Marion Reid, to cut a ribbon of Cougar blue just before 1 p.m. in front of the main entrance and make the library's opening official.Its doors opened for the first time on Jan. 20.

Some 400 people broke into applause as they looked on under a bright sun from the forum plaza, a broad outdoor space leading to the glass doors of the 5-story, 11-sided, 200,000-square-foot library. The building, which bears the Kellogg name and serves the public as well as students and faculty, represents a "coming of age" for the university, Reid said.

The first free-standing library on the campus, the Kellogg offers seven times the space of the former cramped quarters on two floors of the Craven Hall administration building ---- a space that students likened to an overcrowded classroom. The new building allows the university for the first time to put its entire collection --- now 230,000 volumes ---- under one roof. In the late 1980s, when the university started as a satellite of San Diego State, there were about 7,000 volumes at a storefront in a shopping center once anchored by a Jerome's furniture store.

University President Karen S. Haynes, calling the library "the cornerstone and intellectual hub" of any university, reserved special thanks for the Kelloggs and other donors who helped bring the building to the university. "The donations," she said, "turned what would have been a typical state building into an inspirational place."

In a keynote address delivered later Friday afternoon in the university's largest lecture hall, Arts 240, Cal State Fresno library dean Michael Gorman suggested that neither knowledge nor wisdom could exist without libraries. "One of the few certainties," Gorman said, "is that most, if not all, of the answers to all questions will be found in libraries."

He called the Kellogg "an indispensable part of the constellation of libraries of all kinds that is the custodian of the human record in all its glory."

"It is the one place, Gorman said, "in which any member of the university community is free to explore any topic that she or he wishes and is free to let her or his mind soar free of the restraints and constraints of everyday living and the necessary demands of academic structures."

Librarians, he added, "believe in and stand for the triumph of human reason over superstition and mental darkness."

In a brief interview before his speech, Gorman said information is only a tool for students to use in a library as they evolve toward gaining wisdom. "If you stay at the level of information," he said, "you live your life at the level of a radio talk show."

To illustrate that values such as the encouragement of unfettered inquiry endure for years in her profession, Reid wore what she said was the typical garb of the librarian of a century ago. In this case, it was a long emerald-green dress with an off-white frilly blouse buttoned all the way up to the throat.

Student government president Honey Folk told the crowd that she and her colleagues "promise to hold fast to the gifts you have given us that include the desire instilled in us to keep learning and growing."

Pauma tribal chairman Chris Devers, who said his Lusieno ancestors may well have lived 2,000 years ago on the land where the library now sits, urged that the Kellogg be one of the sites in the region where diversity and tolerance are fostered. "The more we know about each other," he said, "the more we can get along and share all the gifts that have been bestowed on us."

Devers also reminded the students that "unlike anything else, education is something that no one can ever take away from you."

U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Escondido, said the people of North County overcame the "tough time" of getting the library project started and now have put something here that will affect people "for a long, long time."

In the crowd was his daughter, April Cunningham-Hannon, herself a holder of a master's degree in library science from UCLA and a librarian at National University in Kearney Mesa.

While the party went on outside, many students were glued to their studies inside the Kellogg, among them business majors Louis "Cali" Caliendo and Mike Dempster, both natives of Brooklyn, N.Y. who transferred to the hill from Palomar College.

Caliendo, who came back this spring after serving in Iraq as a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, called the Kellogg "a place of refuge" and a stark contrast to the crowded bustle of the former Craven Hall headquarters.

Dempster, who was writing at a computer terminal next to Caliendo on the main floor, said his research needs have taken him to far-flung libraries such as San Diego State's during his student career, something he said he knows now will not be necessary again.