ENCINITAS -- As the city's long-awaited library sprouts from a hilltop on Cornish Drive, one voice on City Council continues to question what role the $20 million building will play in an age where powerful computers can fit in a shirt pocket.

"I'm not in any way trying to denigrate the value of the library," Mayor James Bond said last week. "It will just be totally different. I think it will be more of an intellectual coffee shop than a library. Heaven knows it will have one of the best patio views in the city."

But one of Bond's colleagues says libraries -- books and all -- are here to stay, a prognostication shared by some academics and the county library director.

Bond says his misgivings stem from a career he spent witnessing technological advances as a telephone company executive. He retired more than a decade ago, but recalls when cell phones were as bulky as work boots and computers were the size of semi-tractor trailers.

Today, Bond said he responds to e-mails and updates his calendar on a hand-held computer from the comfort of his patio. Before long, he predicts, an equally portable computer will be able to store the entirety of a library's collection.

Bond voted last year to approve the library's construction, even though the project exceeded the city's estimate by $6.3 million.

"The information age is going to affect us all," he warned at the time. "We need our community and staff to come to grips with that."

'A brand new dinosaur'

As construction workers toil at the Encinitas library, officials in Escondido are debating how to pay for a new library after the state library bond failed last November. Escondido officials say whether a new library is built, or the existing one is remodeled, the facility should keep up with the times by providing plenty of computers.

On the coast, several new libraries have opened in recent years, and now, the computer labs are always filled with patrons.

In 1996, after $2.6 million in renovations, Del Mar opened a library in a former church. The Carlsbad City Library on Dove Lane, a $22 million project, opened in 1999. A $3.7 million library opened on a school campus in Solana Beach in 2001. The curvilinear Cardiff-by-the-Sea Library opened in 2003 at a cost of $2.6 million.

In Encinitas, Bond's colleague, Councilwoman Maggie Houlihan, a retired UCSD librarian, catalogued materials and taught people how to find them.

One of the biggest challenges libraries face, she said, is private interests attempting to privatize information.

"Jim's right," she said of the mayor. "I guess I could go online and pay $3 for that article, but why should I have to do that? Part of a democracy is to have free access to free materials."

Bond last week said he understands that questioning the relevance of the library rankles some constituents -- he continues to refer to the library a "$20 million coffee shop" -- but he stands by his notion that libraries are a dying breed.

"My only concern with the library is that it is kind of a brand new dinosaur," he said.

Challenging privilege

When completed, the 27,000-square-foot library will include community, teen and children's rooms, as well as space for the Friends of the Encinitas Library. A west-facing deck will command sweeping views of downtown Encinitas and the ocean.

Encinitas will own and maintain the building and the county of San Diego will operate it as one of 33 branch libraries.

Also planned is a computer lab with 40 terminals.

Like all of the public computers in the county library system, the ones in Encinitas will see heavy use from the moment the library opens, said Jose Aponte, county library director.

For many people, he said, libraries provide their only access to computers and the Internet.

And that's just one way that Aponte says libraries challenge the notion of privilege in a democratic society.

"First and fundamentally, 40 percent of citizens don't have access to online services," he said. "With the library card -- that's the most valuable card in your wallet -- you can get online for free."

Once connected, library patrons can gain access to more than $500,000 worth of databases. Articles and reports, which private parties must pay to read, are available free of charge at libraries -- providing instant availability to a number of professional, medical, academic and business journals with just a few clicks.

Computers might be booked solid at libraries, but the copious information available online can be unwieldy, Aponte said.

"It's like the Library of Congress," he said, but "without card catalogues or shelves."

Bricks and mortar

By contrast, the 1.6 million items circulating within the county system are indexed and librarians knows just where to find them.

At Oceanside's municipal library last week, a MiraCosta College student said that with the help of a librarian, she dug up plenty of material for an essay.

After spending more than two hours at the library, which is designed to look like a California mission, Baptista Daniels, 23, photocopied some pages before heading home.

Nearby, men hunkered over newspapers and teens waited for their turns to use the library's computers.

"I personally like coming to the library," Daniels said. "It's a way to get out of the house."

Among other things, Aponte said, a home computer will never provide its user with the physical space -- a temple of learning and knowledge -- that libraries provide. An impoverished person sharing a small or crowded apartment won't find in a laptop the feeling of openness and solitude he finds in a library, nor will a computer screen serve as a kind of community fulcrum.

"Bricks and mortar," he said. "You can't get that through a Palm Pilot."

Cultural hubs

Libraries are more than just databases, said Christine Borgman, professor and presidential chair in information studies at UCLA. They are cultural and community hubs, she said, and since the days of Benjamin Franklin, they serve as "the people's university."

She added that despite technological advances, nearly 50,000 new book titles are published each year.

At any library, digital information can be especially difficult to preserve and curate, as new formats and storage media seem to evolve continually, she said.

On the Internet, free information represents but a fraction of the information that is available -- for a price.

"What you're getting on the Internet is the small portion that is free, but you're sure not getting the journals that the city needs to be competitive," Borgman said.

Online content often is protected by copyright, which means looking at the material usually requires paying a fee -- except at libraries.

"I think the role of the library as a provider of access to information, irrespective of economic capability or any other kind of restricting characteristic, will continue well, well into the future," said Brian Shottlaender, the Audrey Geisel librarian at UCSD and a member of the Library of Congress Working Group on Bibliographic Control.

Beyond unlocking the financial doors to reams of online information, libraries serve as repositories of local lore, where archival collections offer geneologies, oral histories and other information that most people won't find on hand-held computers.

Meanwhile, as the seemingly bottomless pit of content on the Internet continues to fill, it is inceasingly becoming more and more laborious to sort through it all.

"Ironically," Shottlaender said, "as more and more content is now available on the Internet, people are finding it more and more difficult to find stuff. The haystack is getting bigger."

Contact staff writer Adam Kaye at (760) 901-4074 or akaye@nctimes.com. Comment at nctimes.com.