At 43, John Brooks is old enough to recall when research required knowledge of the Dewey decimal system and meant hours combing through the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature and stacks of academic journals.

With age comes perspective. "I remember going through all those books, looking for the same thing that I get now in a matter of minutes or seconds," says Brooks.

Now enrolled as a nontraditional student in a graduate psychology program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Brooks has yet to research a single journal article at the campus library.

That's not surprising. Brooks, a former racehorse trainer, lives 375 miles from the UAB campus. His home is in Sylvester, Ga., population 6,000.

As a tuition-paying distance learner, Brooks has permission to log into UAB's library. He chooses not to. Instead, he stays closer to home - in a cyber sense - by clicking into an innovative data-access system known as GALILEO, operated by the University System of Georgia.

"If you need a basic article, or if you need something more in-depth, this is where you find it," says Brooks.

GALILEO, an acronym for GeorgiA LIbrary LEarning Online, transports Brooks and thousands of other Georgia residents to a world far beyond the southeastern United States.

It's a world of information and data - once open only to scholars - now suddenly available to every Georgian, from the urban precincts of Atlanta and Savannah to hamlets like Sylvester, 60 miles due south of Macon.

"It's not unusual for university library systems to share databases," says Susan Hildreth, president of the Public Library Association, an affiliate of the American Library Association. "But GALILEO is unique because it serves both the general public and the academic communities. A lot of other states have pieces of what they are doing in Georgia, but not the extent of the services that GALILEO makes available to all different types of libraries."

And that is precisely what the system's founders had in mind. "We wanted to set it up so the smallest libraries would have comparable holdings to the largest libraries," says Merryll Penson, executive director of library services for the University System of Georgia, which oversees the program. "This way, a student at a small two-year college ... can take advantage of the resources that a large university would have."

Actually, Penson understates the case. As librarians across the state enthusiastically attest, GALILEO's reach extends far beyond Georgia's system of community colleges.

"It allows small towns the same level of service as Athens, Rome and Atlanta," says Sandy Hester, head librarian at Fitzgerald-Ben Hill County Library in Fitzgerald, Ga. "We have the exact same access as the bigger cities and the colleges. It's a great field leveler. Our high school students have the opportunity to write the same quality papers as other high school students across the state because they have access to the same materials."

The genesis of GALILEO dates back to 1968, light years on the technology timeline - well before "google" was a verb, a noun or even a gleam in two geeks' eyes. Much like the formation of the World Wide Web, the initial idea was to provide an electronic forum that would allow librarians at public colleges and universities throughout Georgia to compare notes and share solutions to common problems.

What occurred nearly a quarter century later was equal parts serendipity and foresight. In 1994, Georgia went one step further than many other states when it dedicated $6 million toward integrating the databases of its university and college library systems. Not coincidentally, another technological trend was beginning to weave itself into the fabric of American culture: the Internet.

As Jayne Williams notes in The Early History of GALILEO, it was in the mid-1990s that Georgia seized on the idea of a comprehensive online library system that "would serve the entire population of Georgia, not only those formally enrolled in educational institutions." With remarkable speed, GALILEO was up and running in September 1995, slightly more than a year after the idea was first broached.

Merryll Penson strongly advocated for GALILEO from concept to roll-out. Elevated to the position of executive director of library services in 2000, she's an even bigger supporter now. The idea was to level the playing field, and Penson is among dozens of librarians across the state who say that GALILEO has succeeded beyond anyone's expectations.

GALILEO now includes databases at the state's leading comprehensive and research universities - the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech - as well as well-known private institutions such as Emory University and Morehouse College.

Through the years, it has become clear to both state and government officials that the system's benefits extend far beyond the data available to a stay-at-home graduate student in Sylvester or a freshman accounting major at Georgia State University.

"We don't say we are saving money, because we're spending money," says Penson. "But we are avoiding higher costs," she points out, because GALILEO allows individual institutions to share outlays for licensing fees, technical support and other expenses.

At Fitzgerald-Ben Hill County Library, GALILEO has provided a world-class asset on a shoestring budget. Serving the state's third-smallest county, the library operates on an annual budget of only $300,000.

"Without GALILEO, we would be stuck forking over thousands of dollars in yearly subscriptions - or we simply wouldn't be able to provide this wonderful service to our patrons," says head librarian Sandy Hester.

There's another benefit, too: With community libraries competing simultaneously for public dollars and for the attention of patrons drawn by countless other diversions, GALILEO has become a means to get people in the building.

"You can't access it from home without a password, so it has become a drawing card. It's a marketing tool for us," says Leigh Wiley, the librarian who introduced John Brooks to GALILEO during a visit to the Margaret Jones Public Library in Sylvester.

During its formative years in the pre-Google era, GALILEO didn't have to compete with the popular search engine. Even now though, Penson and other librarians insist that GALILEO is a heavy favorite in the information competition. It provides access to everything from the popular EBSCO academic database to dissertations with titles such as "The ethnophysiology of the Tzeltal Maya of Highland Chiapas." Even Google has a tough time matching that range.

"It's an invaluable reference for reliable information," says Hester. "Patrons don't have to worry about the validity of the information they've found. They don't have the same worries as they do when they conduct searches on the general Internet."

Adds Penson: "The more serious kind of information for term papers or to conduct meaningful research is not free on the Internet. For students who know what is out there and what is reliable, GALILEO pushes them back to the library."

Sometimes, though, it isn't students who plumb GALILEO's troves. At Catoosa County Library in Ringgold, Ga., for instance, GALILEO gives genealogy buffs easy access to special journals and Web sites that typical online search engines either bury or fail to uncover at all.

"Twenty years ago, they had to go from library to library, searching for the information in card catalogs or on microfiche," recalls Catoosa County librarian Connie Haney. "Now they can come in and find everything they need."

For Penson, GALILEO is - on a personal level - a myth dispeller. It shatters the stereotype of libraries as musty bastions of old-school stodginess. In fact, it shows that libraries and librarians are positively cutting-edge.

"Librarians have played a tremendous role in helping people understand the value of technology," Penson says. "It's not the technology; it's what you can do with it."