On a hot summer day like today, back in my more youthful days, heading to the library was one way to combat the heat. I don’t think the library even had air conditioning, it was just a huge old stone building, built back in the day where architects sited building to take advantage of what the topography and seasons offered. The stacks, deep in the bowels of the library, housed the books that weren’t all that popular with the public, but that’s where ancient tomes on Hitites and giant squids could be found, instead of displays pimping the lastest incarnation of the “Joy of …” something, and it was cool. Just not hip. But libraries, according to recent news reports, are trying to appeal to the hipsters, and not just a cool place to hang out at on a hot summer day.

These days, as one Salon writer opined, “Like trucker hats and last week’s version of the iPhone, libraries have an image problem. Wait, did you say libraries? Those places with the passed out homeless people and the twenty-year-old editions of the “World Book”?”

So totally uncool. But the gist of the article though had more to to do with the next “big thing”in libraries.

A Tuesday Associated Press story on the runaway success of a Dallas library located in a downtown shopping mall shows what can go right when you put libraries in the path of receptive consumers. In just two years, the NorthPark children’s library has blossomed into a bustling local hub that checks out more books than branches eight times its size. And Dallas isn’t the only city innovating the look of the seemingly stodgy institutions. A Wichita library rests inside a grocery store, and the Princeton library offers a bookshop, café and that most irresistible bourgeois hangout — a greenmarket. Elsewhere, libraries “have built cafes, provided downloadable books or installed drive-through windows.”

Coupled with this timely Boston Globe article on the art of studying, something I wasn’t in need of back in my more youthful days, which appretnly jives with the decline and fall of studying.

According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

The decline, Babcock and Marks found, infects students of all demographics. No matter the student’s major, gender, or race, no matter the size of the school or the quality of the SAT scores of the people enrolled there, the results are the same: Students of all ability levels are studying less.

Yegads Captain Obvious, who has time to study anything these days? Why it requires reading stuff. Since I liked to read books wholly unrelated to whatever coursework I was taking, I managed to avoid studying and learn something. I think. But we do have an interesting intersection of technology, habits and productivity to check out.

The easy observation is that somehow all this new fangled technology is killing off studying. But not so fast.

According to the skeptics of the findings, there is one other notable change: Today’s students are working with more efficient tools when they do finally sit down to study. They don’t have to bang out a term paper on a typewriter; nor do they need to wander the stacks at the library for hours, tracking down some dusty tome.

“A student doesn’t need to retype a paper three times before handing it in,” said Heather Rowan-Kenyon, an assistant professor of higher education at Boston College. “And a student today can sit on their bed and go to the library, instead of going to the library and going to the card catalog.”

That’s true, Babcock and Marks agree. But according to their research, the greatest decline in student studying took place before computers swept through colleges: Between 1961 and 1981, study times fell from 24.4 to 16.8 hours per week (and then, ultimately, to 14). Nor do they believe student employment or changing demographics to be the root cause. While they acknowledge that students are working more and campuses attract students who wouldn’t have bothered attending college a generation ago, the researchers point out that study times are dropping for everyone regardless of employment or personal characteristics.

So what is going on? How people learn is a field of study fraught with more snake oil than the victorian era phrenologists. But the reality is that, like the proverbial snowflake, no individual has the same learning style. For all the modern era has to offer, we still seem stuck on trying to solve all the intricacies of learning by a one size fits all solution. In Laredo Texas, population 250k, the last chain book store closed, leaving Laredo with no bookstore, which naturally people there bemoaned. Just another data point about where that thing called a book fits in these days with the larger issue of just how are people learning.