Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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It is easy to pop a CD-ROM encyclopedia in the PC, and easier still to look for answers using online references or search engines.

When you pull a reference from the Internet shelf (when you download a file), the information remains on the shelf. The next patron doesn't have to wait for you to return it.

The Internet, because it uses a universal interface and because it breaks the knowable universe down into bits, allows searches of vast amounts of information. If finding information in a library is sometimes like looking for a needle in a haystack, on the Internet the haystack comes to you. Query a search engine with the string "Columbus," and you will be buried in data.

It is almost too easy. The Internet is hotlinked, which a conventional encyclopedia cannot be. And it has famously flexible hours.

Are libraries, therefore, on the decline? Not according to the traditional measures. Public libraries are checking out books in growing numbers, to a expanding body of users.

Libraries were networking when the Internet was still in diapers. Long before computers linked up to one another, libraries were networking to share resources. The metaphor of interlibrary lending is the intellectual ancestor to today's network of computer networks.

Libraries also have trust on their side. The Internet is perceived to be seller-oriented (99 percent of the data on it is data someone else wants you to see). By contrast, the library is seen as buyer-oriented, housing mostly data that users request, year in and year out. Printed and bound information is still seen as the real thing; Web truth seems tainted.

The notion that either is better than the other, therefore, results in a Moebius answer, in which both sides connect to one another:

Libraries are part of the Internet. Nearly every public and academic library makes its collection available online these days, via Telnet dialup or Java database.

The Internet is part of the library. It's an unusual community library that isn't plugged in on many levels. For many people, the library is their only portal to the cyber regions.

The two realms will have to continue to get along. There is no likelihood that, like the computers on the Starship Enterprise, the texts of every book ever written, in every language, will be available online, at no cost, any time soon.

My guess is that as high tech tightens its grip on us all, we will find an almost sensuous pleasure in retreating to a clean, well-lit room we can breathe in. Public libraries will be local high-touch pulloffs on the info superhighway, places where a living, respiring human being can still show you how to find things.

There are still things that your branch library can offer that web info resources can't match. A quiet place to wander the stacks, or to sit and idly flip through a glossy magazine. A place to meet with a group. A water fountain. A Chilton's auto repair guide.

And it strains the imagination to think of a virtual equivalent to having a child and a big book on one's lap, paging through a well-thumbed story.

Another thing the Internet can't do is make you feel guilty, like when you are returning fifty books, twenty of which you didn't read, all of which have to be laboriously scanned and reshelved.

Some harried library person has to do all that, and for all you know that person is looking up from a book cart at you right now, as you drag another barrowload through the checkout.

But I take issue with the idea that books on shelves are more trustworthy than data online. Christopher Columbus discovered the New World pretty much by accident. The maps he studied in the libraries of his day, in Lisbon and Genoa, convinced him that the earth was 25 percent smaller than thought, and composed mostly of land. He could not have been more mistaken. And he used this mistaken logic to persuade the throne of Spain to invest in his east-becomes-west scheme.

More bad research was the outcome of his voyages: library shelves groaning the weighted retellings of his adventures.

If you remember the Columbus quincentennial of 1992, these books glorifying Columbus' voyages are very controversial. Columbus will always be a hero to seekers of new worlds, and a villain to those who made their home there.

This is a lesson one era can hand off to the next: while information abounds, truth is seldom certain.

America's Best-Loved Futurist(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.