URBANA — It's the first day of classes, and the Grainger Engineering Library is already buzzing.

University of Illinois students sip drinks in the coffee shop, huddle over laptops or sit at rows of computers to get a head start on their homework.

Downstairs, in the new high-tech "Idea Lab," juniors Rohan Gupta and Brandon Rice use six large touch-screens to scroll through information for their startup — a crowd-funding platform for universities called "Bilder" — retrieved by the library's cutting-edge search system.

As they work, civil engineering Professor Mani Golparvar Fard uses a giant 13 1/2-by-7-foot screen to demonstrate his drone-flyover technology, used to monitor progress at construction sites — from Chicago's McCormick Place to the future Olympic Stadium in Tokyo.

Today's university library isn't just a place to read books or study — though students still do that. It's where they record video presentations, collaborate on design projects, attend tutoring sessions, check out a DVD or borrow a camera to make a documentary for a class.

Libraries have evolved with the shift to digital information and new teaching styles — replacing book stacks with media centers and creating spaces where students can collaborate using high-end technology.

Gone are the card catalog and microfiche. In their place are the "Ask a Librarian" chat feature on the library website and online search systems, databases and journals. There's even a mobile app to find materials.

"That's the thing about working in libraries. The only constant is change," said Professor William Mischo, head of the Grainger Library.

Millions of users

The UI Library is busier than ever, with its physical "gate count" climbing to 5 million last year plus millions of users online, said JoAnn Jacoby, associate university librarian for user services.

It's actually a library system with several hubs — the Main Library, Undergraduate Library, Grainger Engineering Library and ACES Library — plus 20 departmental libraries across campus (about half as many as the pre-Internet age). The Undergrad alone had 1.1 million visits last year.

But a majority of the library's traffic is online, Jacoby said. About two-thirds of reference questions come through email or online chat messages.

And the number of online searches is "huge" — more than 45 million in 2014-15. Queries come from all over the world, but the majority are on campus, she said.

"It dwarfs what we were ever able to do in person," Jacoby said.

The library has an "enormous and growing print collection," she said, and students in some disciplines, such as history, still rely on print. If you have to read a 400-page manuscript, "a book is still the best technology."

But the vast majority of usage comes through online resources that the library makes available by subscribing to journals, reference materials, electronic books and databases such as EBSCO.

"It's so much easier to access. It's seamless and instant," Jacoby said.

As a result, librarians have taken on more of a "navigational role" — offering search techniques and helping students find and evaluate the best sources of information, she said.

The Minrva mobile app, developed by library associate Professor James Hahn, is connected to the library's catalog. Students can use it to search for books, email themselves an accurate citation for a paper, renew any checked-out items or reserve material for a class — or see what fines they owe.

It's popular with students who don't want to have to go to the library, or even talk to a librarian. Sometimes, students sitting in the library will type in an online chat question rather than walk upstairs to ask a librarian in person, said Lori Mestre, head of the Undergraduate Library.

Old school

All this online activity hasn't displaced the physical library. In some ways, Jacoby said, "they seem to just reinforce each other."

Students like junior Jillian Davis often request books online and pick them up at the Undergraduate Library.

"I go to the library mostly to check out technology," said Davis, who also works at the Undergrad's circulation desk. But she also likes to study at the Architecture Library, where it's quiet.

Libraries are still gathering places where students go to study, alone or with friends, Jacoby said.

The lower floor of the Undergrad remains a bit old-school, reserved mostly for quiet study.

Traditional library shelves hold most of its collection of books and periodicals, roughly 150,000 volumes used for both academic and recreational reading. It includes materials not found in other libraries — health/self-help books, pop culture and a large collection of graphic novels (in comic-strip format).

The Undergrad also has about 35,000 DVDs, for both classroom and entertainment use.

"Friday and Saturday nights are big nights for check-outs," Mestre said.

The book stacks at the Main Library still contain 4 to 5 million books, with even more volumes housed at a storage site on Oak Street. Some students still like to study in the stacks — even though the wireless is spotty — and visiting alumni often take their families through.

"Some people like it because they aren't connected while they are in there," Jacoby said.

And for those still uncomfortable with technology, there's still one lonely typewriter in the Undergrad, used by patrons to type letters or address envelopes.

Technology zone

Libraries also partner with academic departments to support student work. The Undergrad has a Writing Center. A tutoring center at the Grainger Library offers a place for engineering instructors to meet with students or groups of students to reserve rooms to work together.

"It is just packed and crazy busy," Jacoby said.

Throughout campus, there's a greater emphasis on group projects and "real-world problem solving," and libraries have adapted, Jacoby said.

Most students who go to the Undergrad are there to do group work, said Eric Kurt, coordinator of its Media Commons. "After 3 p.m., every chair is filled."

The upper level of the Undergrad has gone through a transformation — down to the furniture — to provide space for collaboration and tech support, Mestre said.

Chairs and sofas are on rollers, so they can be easily rearranged. Ottomans double as tables. A bank of "collaboration rooms" line one wall.

An upstairs reference area was taken out and most periodicals and microfilm moved downstairs.

The "Loanable Technology Zone" now takes up one corner, where students can check out cameras, tripods or recording equipment for projects. They can also borrow a laptop, headphones or a charging cable for use in-house.

The Media Commons, updated in 2013, includes a video-production studio, computer lab, tech-support desk, media editing stations and areas where students can plug their laptops into a large monitor and work together on projects.

The production studio features a full green screen, teleprompters, an overhead grid for stage lights, sound-deadening panels and computerized controls to easily record in different formats.

It's used mostly for student projects — including one history project using sock puppets, Kurt said. But the idea is to make it versatile, for departmental talk shows, promotional videos, one-on-one interviews or a professor's recorded class lecture. It's open to anyone on campus, free of charge.

"Who's using this studio? Literally everybody," Kurt said.

Downstairs, two smaller "self-use" studios are being developed for students who just need to record themselves reading a speech or doing a short interview. They can simply plug a thumb drive into a computer, turn on the camera and hit record.

There's also a high-end audio booth, formerly used for hearing research at the Beckman Institute. Students use it for voiceovers on webcasts, to do interviews or to practice or record music. The library recently added microphones and a keyboard.

Last school year, it was used by 463 people.

"Immediately, it was one of the most popular things we have," Kurt said.

33 million pixels

Up north, Grainger's Idea Lab, which opened last spring, emerged from the "sea change" in teaching and research, with the emphasis on interdisciplinary design projects and "everything online," Mischo said. Grainger was the perfect spot for it, convenient to students and faculty across the College of Engineering, he said.

The entrance features symbols representing key UI engineering discoveries: the integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby, MRI technology developed by Paul Lauterbur, John Bardeen's transistor, Nick Holonyak's light-emitting diode.

Carved out of a room that formerly held stacks of journals and other materials — now in storage — the Idea Lab features enclosed spaces for groups to meet, a presentation area with two 84-inch computer screens, and two "informatics labs" with a half-dozen touch screens that design teams can use to look up and share data or research.

But the showpiece is the "visualization wall," 16 connected screens with 33 million pixels capable of showing ultra high-definition 8K video, the best available.

It's been used to demonstrate giant simulations of a swimming dinosaur that lived in what is now the Boneyard, a village from 3,000 B.C. uncovered on a Scottish isle and real-time wind and ocean currents, part of a national study by UI atmospheric scientists.

While those could be displayed on smaller monitors, the high resolution allows users to zoom in to examine tiny details of a model or simulation. Fard's building fly-by program overlays photos of construction sites with the building plans, so project managers can track progress and quality and spot any potential delays.

The monitors can also be used as separate screens, to view data, models or information from multiple sources all at once.

"We're using this for instruction, we're using it for research," Mischo said.

The two informatics labs were created for design projects that bring together students from engineering, business or other disciplines, who need to find out what's worked and hasn't worked in the past, Mischo said.

Grainger's search system — the Grainger Engineering Library Information Machine, or GELIM (which talks, like Siri) — can display simultaneous results from multiple databases, library catalogs and scholarly articles.

Student reviews

The high-tech tools and larger screens make group work much easier, said Gupta, a finance major, and Rice, an electrical engineer, who've been working on their startup at Grainger for several weeks with computer science graduate student Yang Song.

"We were all able to look at one piece of code together without having to move around. It just made the whole process so much more efficient," Gupta said.

Mischo said the goal is to better integrate information technology into instruction and research. Libraries are now involved in the "knowledge-creation process," rather than being simply repositories of information, he said.

Danny Gardner, a senior in electrical engineering, and business student Jeeth Suresh have used the Idea Lab to work on their startup, which was selected for the "iVenture Accelerator" program housed at Grainger. Their pitch: using cheap Wi-Fi technology to bring internet service to developing countries. They're planning to test it soon in the farm fields of Indiana.

"We developed this idea in my dorm room," Gardner said. "But we saw the limitations fairly early about how much space we had. Things kept getting lost in the clutter."

Having a dedicated, innovative space to work makes it easier to collaborate, Gardner said.

"It's a pretty complex piece of hardware," he said. "The bigger the screen, the more you can see. All five of us can sit around that and see all the electrical connections."

The Idea Lab continues the library's tradition as "the center of knowledge," Suresh said.

"I love to read," he said. "My mom used to take me to the library when I was little." Later, he went to study or get together with friends. Now, it's become a place "to get serious work done."

By the numbers

— 5 MILLION: Gate count for all UI libraries in 2014-15.

— 1.1 MILLION: Gate count for Undergraduate Library in 2015-16.

— 38,464: Times someone borrowed from the Undergrad's Loanable Technology program in 2014-15.

— 2,035: User installs of the "Minrva" mobile app for library searches.

— 200-PLUS: Databases available to campus through the library.

— 5 MILLION: Searches made using those databases.

— 7.82 MILLION: Downloads from those searches, up from about 5 million the previous year.