A girl arrives at a study session. She is the type of girl who spent last evening celebrating her 4.0 GPA, but also the type who you don't even notice when she gets a new tattoo. She sits down across from a man who will never be her boyfriend. She does not tell him that she can draw a perfect circle. She shushes some voices and furrows her brow in a way that will require Botox a decade from now. But matters of this sort, like the future, fall away when she is trying hard to give the appearance of learning Foucault and The Care of Self

This guy is a just a small slice of cheese in the sandwich of her love life, which has otherwise been filled with her long-time boyfriend.

The steps between her looking up from page 439 to his hand running through her hair and her petite shoulders pushing against Dewey decimal number JAR 456.78 through JAR 456.81 are intricate and unwritten, yet obvious and defined, the subtle way that a woman will cut off all of her hair off after a break-up.

His lips hit her neck and she lets out a light whimper that's drowned by a rumble of voices she is now thankful for.

But, the possibility of using the reference section to play a bit of kiss face is at risk. A librarian stands in the chilly warehouse, more suitable for a 4-H convention than for academic acceleration, and speaks to the situation, although temporary, of the SF State library and says, "The days of browsing through shelves are long gone I'm afraid."

The switch to the robotic library is imminent. Whether because of pack-rat overstock or for convenience, library browsing has an uncertain lifeline.

One can reserve a book from the public library online, go to the reserve shelf, pick it up, go the self-checkout, and not talk to a soul. "We should just be overjoyed that people are reading at all," says Michelle Jeffers of the San Francisco Public Library.

Darlene Tong, of the SF State Library, says that Arts and Humanities types are concerned about having things tucked away and out of sight, but many students tend to prefer the efficiency of a robot library.

So the studious little lady who reached for home base, hangs her delicate, red fingernails through chainlink fence and looks through the construction to our own little SF State Alcatraz of books and says, "There's a certain amount of perusing through books that gives way to the expansion of knowledge. If you just go and get your one book, the possibility of discovery is lost."

It may take only two-and-a-half minutes for an automatic library to retrieve a book, or twenty-four hours in the SF State case, and robots and librarians may not be using The Complete Collection of Poems by Rudyard Kipling as a bank board, but a certain something is amiss through the deprivation of running hands over the rich, mossy leather bindings of books and hoping to gain their wisdom if purely by osmosis.