It is not equipped for students who want to plug in their laptops and surf the Internet. For most of the 1990s, the university has tried to drum up the money for an addition to Clark Library, or a whole new building. But when the 23 campuses of a university system are competing for funds, says C. James Schmidt, San Jose's university librarian, getting money for conventional proposals is nearly impossible. The proposed library would be enormous. It is designed to offer more than 3,600 seats, with Internet connections and electrical outlets available at every one.
Preliminary designs show skylights and a corridor of windows to bring in plenty of natural light.
Planners expect that the library, if it is built, would take two or three years to complete. The prospect of a gleaming new building, however, may not be enough to appease a wary population of professors and librarians. Many local librarians wince at mention of the new San Francisco public library up north, which faced a furor two years ago over one patron's discovery that more than 100,000 books had been discarded or shunted aside to accommodate the specifications of the high-tech building. Professors make heated references to CETI, the California Educational Technology Initiative, which represented one of the largest outsourcing efforts that any university system had ever undertaken. One might think that a deal with a city would be less of a lightning rod.