SCU Opens New Learning Commons, Technology Center, and Library

  • 03/26/08
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.

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