The Cyber-Library: Research in the '90s

New York

"Downstairs is the place to be; it's become a cultural happening," pronounces 20-year-old Travis Bunell, his sterling nose ring glistening in the morning sun as we wait for the doors to open at the new Science, Industry and Business Library, in the former B. Altman department store at 34th Street and Madison Avenue.

"Hey, do you know how to use those computers down there to get on the Internet?" asks an eavesdropping scholar wearing bifocals when the doors open and the motley crowd, by now about 100-strong, shuffles into an atrium of oak and stainless steel with a wall of interactive computer screens.

"Come on," says Mr. Bunell, taking the elderly scholar by the arm. "I'll sign you up for a course on the Net."

And so another day begins at "SIBL" (sounds like Sybil), New York's newest public library. Here, a turn-of-the-century Italianate palazzo of retailing has been transformed (for $100 million) into our own version of end-of-the-century grandeur: an emporium for new-fangled electronic information. To be sure, SIBL has not lost all of the trappings of a conventional library. There are books, more than a million of them, mostly in stacks hidden from view. But, as Mr. Bunell says, downstairs is the place to be to see the curious and the homeless, scholars and entrepreneurs, computer cognoscenti and neophytes update the meaning of the public library.

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