There's something deeply impressive about a good library — like the refurbished Julia Ideson or the library at Cambridge's Trinity College, so majestic and historic it's easy to imagine greats like Sir Isaac Newton working out the laws of physics in its confines.

And then there are high school libraries, which are pretty much the opposite of all these things.

The news that Lamar High School has liquidated the majority of its physical book collection and reoriented the space with laptops, an e-book collection and — gasp! — a coffee bar has led to much impassioned hand-wringing by those who remember and understand the Dewey Decimal system.

But libraries, like all institutions of learning, have grown, adapted and changed in the electronic era. Gone are the days when libraries were strictly a place for quiet study and talking in the stacks was verboten. Now libraries — even the ones with bookshelves intact — appropriate space to accommodate collaborative learning, with big desks for groups and copious power plugs and Wi-Fi to facilitate the move away from print materials.

Once upon a time you couldn't eat in libraries, either. But a coffee shop doesn't prohibit learning, especially if the proceeds help pay for new extended hours for students to take advantage of. And books are very much still part of the equation — Lamar has subscribed to Questia, an online database with 70,000 books and over two million academic articles, will offer portals directly accessing the resources of the Library of Congress and is replacing paper tomes with e-books that students can check out from the 35 new in-library laptops or from their home computer.

How many e-books will be available to replace the shrinking shelves? HISD spokesperson Sarah Greer Osborne couldn't give an exact number, but smart money says the total will surpass the library's shelving capacity — if not now, then soon.

But the raw numbers of books available to students might be beside the point. A quick survey of those who graduated high school in the past 10 years reveals only the most cursory use of the school library — as a meeting place for clubs and group projects, to use the Internet, and to "take advantage of the awesome magazine collection." Reading or checking out books? No one could recall doing so.

That's partly because for basic research (a.k.a. what's required for the vast majority of high school projects), the Internet is more than adequate, especially with access to databases like Questia. And for serious research, school libraries simply don't have the space or the resources to offer an extensive, up-to-date catalog that covers all the subjects that would likely come up in the course of four years of study

Luckily there are publicly available resources that are better able to meet this kind of demand — they are called public libraries, and one is within walking distance of Lamar.

If students don't have computer resources at home or can't take advantage of the school library's new 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. hours, they can request any book available for checkout within the entire Houston Public Library system and have it delivered to the Looscan branch on reserve for them within 48 hours.

A perfect system? No. But scarce educational resources should be spent providing the most good for the most students, and it's hard to argue that fealty to maintaining an antiquated system — yes, I'm referring to paper — accomplishes that goal.

As a bonus, if the coffee and couches make the sparse new library a cool place to hang, it's hard to see what's bad about it.

Yes, school libraries are changing. Just because information isn't visible — in books, on shelves — doesn't mean it isn't available.