I’m not kidding.

Donations, including a US$10 mln private donation from Charles Mathewson and International Game Technologies, helped pay for a US$75 mln learning facility that used to be a standard bricks and mortar library at the University of Nevada Reno. And the reality of the situation is that it appears that the bulk of the money laid into this building went into adding space that won’t even be used for books. Nor does it appear that the focus on spending in this building went into creating interactive technology that enables the school to reach beyond its physical location, in a global or domestic way. See here:

For example, the MIKC has the capacity to hold 3 million volumes. (MIKC’s predecessor was a 177,000-square-foot facility holding more than a million volumes.) Zink, however, said he believes that will be an unlikely use. “We will never use the space for that as printed materials will not be published in sufficient quantity over the upcoming years to ever fill it,” he said. “We are contemplating other uses, even such things as storing classified rock samples for geology, etc. for safe keeping and ready retrieval.

Hard-wired into the building of innovation technology that will help students learn in an outwardly facing school environment is this focus on real estate and the tangible.

MARS has six cranes, more than 30,000 bins, is three stories high, and contains more than 600,000 items. MARS handles books published before 1995 that have been checked out seven or fewer times, journals older than one year, most special collections, and most government documents.

It does include some tech that will enable data visualization, but that cannot have been the bulk of costs for this school-based, bricks and mortar library:

Other rooms using high definition signal distribution include a digital studio classroom, equipped with table microphones that auto-steer Sony HD cameras, and a dynamic media lab where film students can develop multimedia projects. The DataWorks labs and services have high-end hardware and software for data visualization, geospatial maps, and more. The MIKC also has two videoconferencing rooms, one accommodating 10 seats and the other accommodating six.