It's not often that a librarian is warned to stay away from the bookshelves because of high voltage and that students aren't allowed to roam freely through the stacks - but it's becoming more common.

At Chicago State University, a college on the city's South Side that dates to the 1860s, only robots are allowed to browse most books and archives.

The library, unveiled last fall, was designed to make it easier for students and faculty to find the right book, instead of wandering aimlessly through the stacks in a frustrating search, said Lawrence McCrank, dean of CSU's Library and Instructional Services.

In 2001, when school officials were initially mapping out the needs of the students, many of whom are older and working at least part time, one of the biggest concerns they voiced was a desire to save time, McCrank said.

"We discovered that the average student took 30 minutes to find a book. Books would be misplaced or not filed correctly," McCrank said. "That's a lot of time that cuts into how long students can spend analyzing the material, focusing on work, or continuing to find even more research on a particular subject."

Chicago State officials did decide that students needed easy physical access to some books. Materials for current classroom coursework and more recently published items are scattered through the top two stories of the four-story library.

But the nerve center of the building is a central, massive concrete warehouse that holds nearly 80 percent of its collection, including about 375,000 volumes and the school's archive materials.

Silver-toned metal storage bins are stacked on top of one another, with the rows towering from the floor to its three-story ceiling. Books, microfiche rolls and digital media disks - all published before 1991 - are held inside each bin.

Each item is tagged with a radio-frequency ID chip - a small white sticker with an electronic sensor built into it. A computer system uses those chips to figure out in which bin each book or other bit of material is stored.

To get a particular book, students and faculty must log onto the library's website from home or school and place an order for a title.

Once the order is received, the library's computer system directs a robotic crane - dubbed "Rover" by the librarians - to retrieve one of more than 6,300 bins. Each bin holds the equivalent of four bookshelves.

The crane then brings the bin to a workstation at the front of the warehouse, where a librarian picks up the book.

All told, the system takes about three minutes from when the book order is placed and when the librarian is carrying it to the circulation desk for pickup, said Leathea Williams, head of the library's circulation department.

"Gone are the days where students will go and hide books from classmates on the shelves. We don't even need to keep track of which stacks are devoted to music or education or history," Williams said. "The books don't even need to be stored together by subject.

"The books can go anywhere there's free space, because the computer keeps track of it all for us."

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