"The closed collections of tight and dark book stacks, card catalogues and strictly silent environs of the typical university library of the 1970s and early 1980s, protected by the custodianship of the librarians, is seldom seen in Australia today," says Liz Curach, librarian at the University of Western Sydney.

Evolution has been rapid and dramatic, with book stacks now largely open to all users and light, airy spaces to accommodate social interaction - as well as quiet study space - increasingly the norm rather than the exception.

"The custodial role of the librarian is now very much secondary to the more critical role of guiding and assisting students through the plethora of information and misinformation now available at the tap of a keystroke," Curach says. "The library serves not only as a repository for recorded knowledge but is actively committed to making accessible that knowledge, regardless of format or location."

The University of Sydney Library was established in 1851 and is the oldest university library in Australia. In 1885, the university received £30,000 from the estate of Thomas Fisher, a local retired boot-maker and property investor, to be used in establishing and maintaining a library. This assisted with the construction of the first Fisher Library, which was opened in 1909.

"The reading room was in the Gothic tradition with a magnificent cedar roof and adjoining multi-tier book stack of advanced design, including two electric book lifts," says the director of Sydney eScholarship at University of Sydney Library, Ross Coleman.

"Early photos show it as a grand, cavernous hall, with students primly working at bench desks, and books were fetched for them from the stacks."

The old Fisher Library is now the MacLaurin Hall, which is used for various functions and events. The new Fisher Library was opened in 1963 and brought with it some odd rules.

"The most quirky was that women were not allowed to wear stiletto heels in fear that the new linoleum laid throughout the library may be punctured or some injury occur to the wearer of the shoes," Coleman says.

The shift to digital-networked information has had a tremendous impact, he says, not just in how students find and use information but also in the kinds of services and facilities the library offers.

"The changes are best demonstrated in the new SciTech Library, amalgamating five libraries into one modern library suited for the new study and technological needs of today's students," Coleman says. It subscribes to more than 65,000 electronic journals and its e-book collection exceeds 350,000 titles.

Macquarie University is in the process of building a cutting-edge library to replace its existing 1960s-built facility, which is unable to properly provide the services required by new students.

University librarian Maxine Brodie says the existing building was designed and built well before the age of the PC and the internet and does not meet students' needs to access both print and online resources and to study alone or in collaborative groups.

"The brutalist '60s architectural style of the current building reinforces the old view that libraries are built to protect the books and not to facilitate the use of resources and services," Brodie says.

The key design concepts for this new centre of learning and research include light and connection and a strong sense of place, with 3000 flexible, configurable study spaces based on new approaches to the concept of designing learning spaces.

The library will be the first in Australia to use an automated storage-and-retrieval system. The system will store up to 1.8 million items and will be complemented by an open-access browsing collection consisting of up to 500,000 items. "Apart from more cost-effective use of built space, these systems encourage the use of print because retrieval is so much faster than walking the stacks and clients can request that items be retrieved for their use before they set foot in the library," Brodie says.

In a tangible sign that times are changing in academia, Macquarie University's new state-of-the-art $92 million library is also the first academic library building to aim to attain a five-star Green Star design rating under the Green Building Council of Australia's education rating tool.