SCU Opens New Learning Commons, Technology Center, and Library

On Monday, March 24, Santa Clara University will officially open a new 194,000-square-foot building, the Harrington Learning Commons, Sobrato Technology Center, and Orradre Library. The $95 million facility, which began construction in mid-2006, will house traditional texts, rare books, and archives alongside the latest high-tech tools and resources.

"This building has been designed for people rather than for materials, to provide the variety of spaces our students and faculty need for learning, teaching, and scholarship. The design also makes it relatively easy for us to adapt it to new styles of learning, new ways of interacting, new kinds of information resources as we move into the future," said Ron Danielson, SCU's vice provost for information services and chief information officer.

Besides the library's 1.1 million volume collection, the building features 25 collaborative workrooms, multimedia laboratories, video facilities, wireless networking throughout, and 1,050 reader seats with electrical connections and wired ports. High-tech library facilities include climate-controlled storage and workspaces for valuable archives and special collections, an automated retrieval system with a shelving capacity of 1 million volumes, incubator spaces for education technology experimentation, and a real café.

For more information, visit www.scu.edu/newlibrary.

Featured

  • SXSW EDU

    Explore the Future of AI in Higher Ed at SXSW EDU 2025

    This March 3-6 in Austin, TX, the SXSW EDU Conference & Festival celebrates its 15th year of exploring education's most critical issues and providing a forum for creativity, innovation, and expression.

  • man working on laptop outdoors

    Digital Leadership Must-Haves for 2025: A CDO's Picks

    Now that he's more than a year and a half into his chief digital officer role at NJIT, we've asked Ed Wozencroft to reflect on his areas of concentration: What work must digital leaders "own" in 2025?

  • From Fire TV to Signage Stick: University of Utah's Digital Signage Evolution

    Jake Sorensen, who oversees sponsorship and advertising and Student Media in Auxiliary Business Development at the University of Utah, has navigated the digital signage landscape for nearly 15 years. He was managing hundreds of devices on campus that were incompatible with digital signage requirements and needed a solution that was reliable and lowered labor costs. The Amazon Signage Stick, specifically engineered for digital signage applications, gave him the stability and design functionality the University of Utah needed, along with the assurance of long-term support.

  • digital artwork of glowing, interconnected neural-like shapes on a gradient background of deep blue and vibrant purple

    Google Announces Upgrade to Flagship Gemini AI Platform, Enhancing Multimodal Capabilities

    Google has launched Gemini 2.0, designed to empower enterprise users and developers with advanced multimodal capabilities and enhanced performance.