Graduate students at Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center have created a couple of games for your geeky pleasure: click on the pic to practice your library skills -

Do libraries in the western countries and USA really work as restaurants and cafes? So there is a waiter-boy who not only carry out your order but even try to guess what is that you really need.

without playing the game, ie, only responding to how you describe it, yes. you can ask the librarian for a book, even giving him/her only a partial title and they will hopefully find it and be able to track it down on the shelves for you. sure, they'd rather you did this yourself, and pretty much all libraries are set up with computer databases for you to search for the book you want, find the call numbers and go find it on the shelves yourself, but librarians aremore than happy to help you.

As Bill said, it's the librarian who will hunt stuff up for you. But now that I re-read your question, you are actually talking about the upsurge of libraries with cafe's in them, right? Well, we had one nearby - the cafe was downstairs in the library and separate from everything, run by a catering company. It didn't last, and there was really no connection to the library itself.

a lot of the big libraries are like that. i really like it when there's a cafe near to the book stacks and opened up so you can take a book over there and read while eating. i tend to spend a LOT of time in the library.

Just remember, you're talking to someone who has to handle those books with the coffee spills/chocolate smears/grease splotches on them :-))

Worst, though, are the unidentifiable things we find on children's books... and dvd/cd discs - wow - I don't know why parents let their kids handle those!

now now, i treat books with respect. i might eat while reading, but i make sure not to leave a mess. and i know what you mean b/c i've seen the state of some library books. (and don't get me started on library dvds... people seem to just leave them lying around to get scratched up then take them back to the library. half the time i can't even watch the dvd b/c it keeps skipping and freezing. XD)