Where once there were stacks of books at UW-Madison's College Library, now there are big tables, littered with laptops and pizza boxes.

In the place of journals, there is a coffee house and cafe. And windows that were blocked by bookshelves now reveal an expansive view of Lake Mendota's blue water.

This is the changing face of College Library, housed within Helen C. White Hall.

It holds about 30,000 fewer volumes than it did five years ago, sells coffee and pastries, and nary a shhhh has been heard in many a year.

But calm thy fury, bibliophiles. Unlike some libraries that have emptied in the digital era, this undergraduate library is thriving, said UW-Madison director of libraries Ken Frazier, with about 1.2 million visitors a year.

UW-Madison is adapting to students whose study and research habits are vastly different than they were a generation ago by revolutionizing the traditional concept of what makes up a library.

The changes are happening at College Library and at other libraries on campus.

"This isn't about going into the coffee shop business and abandoning the library," Frazier said. "There are people who really lament this change. But if we hadn't done it, we would have lost the users, the students."

'You come here often?'

Most of the changes are driven by the availability of resources in digital form and an increasing emphasis on group learning, Frazier said.

College Library has long been considered a social space on campus. An oft-cited 1994 Playboy article ranked it as the No. 3, non-tavern pickup spot for dates in the country.

Now, librarians appear to be tacitly — if not outrightly — encouraging the fraternization.

There are only about 100 paper journals or magazines left at College Library, where previously there were a thousand. And most of them are less academic and more focused on popular culture or current events, like Bicycling or Time. The scholarly journals are still available at the university's Memorial Library or in digital form.

The reference collection was cut by two-thirds. Librarians say users are no longer calling libraries for factual information, turning to Google or other Internet search engines instead.

Librarians got rid of thousands of photocopied course readers and are weeding out infrequently used books from the reserve collection, which get stored at Memorial Library. They try to find good homes for duplicate copies of journals that are no longer needed, but Frazier reluctantly admitted that they toss or shred some because of prohibitively high shipping costs.

The changes made room for more study and gathering spaces. The school added about 15 to 20 percent more seats in College Library in the past two years.

Students like spaces where they can "see and be seen," Frazier said.

They also added about 500 new electric outlets for laptops and other devices, although students complain it's still not enough, said Dave Luke, acting associate director for technology.

Natural light

Other libraries on campus are also changing to make space for group studies, such as Steenbock, the agricultural and life sciences library, and Wendt, the engineering library. Those two libraries also trimmed volumes of journals and reference materials, moved stacks away from windows to let in more natural light, and added lounge areas.

Deborah Helman, director of Wendt, said in the past, you'd see people browsing journals or books. Now, most of the journals are online.

"In reality, most of what people come into library for now is to use our space," she said.

She said students are increasingly expected to work in groups, as they will when they graduate and get jobs. But even when they're not actually working together, students apparently like to be in the company of one another, she said.

"A student once told me, sometimes they just like to suffer with other people while they study," she said.

For those who don't want to be amid a din of chatter while they work, there are designated quiet study rooms in most campus libraries.

And there's always Memorial Library, which, as a full-fledged research library, has retained all its books and offers its infamous carrels for students looking to study in caged silence.

Browsing no more

The main book collection has not gotten smaller at College Library, and students — surprisingly or not — still read them. Book circulation remains about the same as it was five years ago.

UW-Madison's print collection is also growing steadily, at about two linear miles per year. The university is requesting $9.3 million from the state to build an off-campus, high-density storage facility in the next budget.

But University of Wisconsin System also recognizes the need to offer more journals electronically across all campuses and is also requesting $6 million to expand its databases.

With more and more books and journals available digitally, some librarians mourn the loss of the ritual of browsing through the stacks, which can lead to the serendipity of finding a new or unexpected book.

Frazier and his staff realize it is the price they must pay to keep libraries a vibrant, relevant space on campus.

"Some people think it doesn't look like a library unless it's got spines," Frazier said. "I think it looks like a modern library."