Ask librarian Laura Cifelli. She knows.

The public library in downtown Fort Myers is filled with the same faces that live in the homes surrounding it. There is the woman in the pink shirt who walked there from the Greyhound bus station across the street; children from Dunbar, just finished with their school day; businessmen and women who work on the other side of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where the streets are new and the buildings freshly painted; and a homeless man sitting reading a paperback thriller at a table by the "New Fiction" isle.

Laura Cifelli COURTESY PHOTO Seats at the computer terminals are packed Thursday afternoon after school gets out. The kids come in and mix with adults, in some cases juxtaposing the technologically inclined — the grade-school girl with a purple backpack sitting beside a bewildered gray-haired senior struggling to send an e-mail. The young/old seating arrangement can work out nicely, says reference librarian Laura Cifelli. She has often noticed a helpful child who will reach over, and hand-over-hand, teach an elder the power of the mouse and the "send" command.

As a whole, the busy library patrons seem unaware of the vast repository of information Ms. Cifelli commands, even as she sits inconspicuously behind her desk with a sharp-looking pair of eye glasses and shiny red-brown hair. While she can enforce the rules with little more than a no-nonsense gaze or gentle touch on the shoulder — no sleeping, be respectfully quiet, turn off your cell phone — a brilliant white smile appears if she gets the chance to help you discover just what you were looking for.

"You could say, 'I really like this recent book,' and we'll get you set up," she said. "You could say 'I just lost my job, what do I do?' You could say, 'I want to find out about the genealogy of my family in Wyoming.' You could need a passport. There's really no end…"

Ms. Cifelli (one of six reference librarians downtown) likens herself to a chef sitting in a pantry stocked with the finest ingredients, tall shelves receding into the information-laden distance. See: volumes on cupcakes and birds, 18th century English literature and art from the Renaissance Period, mutual fund tomes and fashion magazines, Beethoven, Kubrick, Shakespeare and Google.

She is there to help you, the schoolchild; or you, the businessman; and yes even you, the professor and professional researcher. She is there to help you use the library's resources for your own designs. And while she's taking your questions, Ms. Cifelli is keeping an eye on just who is coming in the doors — an estimated 1,000 people per day seeking information at the downtown branch, where she has worked for nine years.

Although she once studied psychology and anthropology, and is a certified paralegal and trained nurse, Ms. Cifelli followed her parents to Florida and graduated with a master's in library and information science from the University of South Florida in 1996. She grew up in Flemington, N.J., about one hour from Philadelphia and one hour from downtown Manhattan. "It was home of the Lindbergh trial," she pointed out, adding, "It's not the 'Yo! I'm from The Sopranos!' part of New Jersey. It's the gorgeous part. It's the reason why New Jersey is called The Garden State."

Since coming to the downtown branch as a librarian in 2000, Ms. Cifelli watched it grow out of its original design, as a library aimed at the business community, to a neighborhood hot spot, truly an "urban library."

Many immigrants have moved to the surrounding neighborhoods, she said, from "Haiti, Central America, and the Caribbean Islands. We're getting some Asian countries (too)." Because many of the surrounding blocks are impoverished, the library gets a greater number of the down-on-their-luck and unemployed, who often use the computers to fill out job applications or file for unemployment dollars.

Ms. Cifelli created a computer program to help them called the Paper Computer Coach. It walks the computer un-savvy through the process of online forms such as applying for food stamps, unemployment or just signing up for e-mail. "Some of the neediest people are being weeded out by technological Darwinism," Ms. Cifelli said. She credits her supervisor with being open to the idea.

As new families have sprouted up in the neighborhood around the library, Ms. Cifelli is welcoming their children and getting to know some of their names. She said they come to the library "as soon as school lets out; if they miss the bus; if they're suspended; if they haven't done their homework and don't want to go to school — they're here. It's pretty cool that it's a safe haven for them. Better that they're here than out somewhere else."

On Thursday night, she was expecting a push of school children with questions about homework assignments, and then the regular group from the Oasis Youth Shelter, part of a nearby Lutheran church.

"We'll try to keep them to a dull roar," Ms. Cifelli said.