Oral Roberts University recently broke ground on the $18 million J.D. McKean Library, which will be built 100% debt-free.

“We have been planning this project for over two years, and it will take two years to construct,” ORU President William Wilson said at the Oct. 20 groundbreaking ceremony.

“J.D. McKean is a long-time supporter of ORU,” Wilson said, “and was awarded a lifetime global achievement award by this university. In 1997 he founded the JDM Foundation, which has provided scholarship funding to hundreds of ORU students.”

Part of the first phase of buildings in the “Whole Leaders for the Whole World” campaign, the three-story, 40,000-square-foot library will be a landmark at ORU. Amenities will include a Creativity Lab Room, media and technology, and the Holy Spirit Research Center, along with other technologically advanced resources, officials said.

The library is the second of four planned construction projections on campus. The first started in April when ORU broke ground on a new welcome center.

Groundbreakings are also planned for November for a new media arts center and a new athletics center.

“It is an exciting time to carry on ORU’s tradition of having a very strong library and of keeping up with the technologies that promote learning,” said the dean of Learning Resources, Mark Roberts. “From the beginning, the ORU library exploited the best available learning technologies, which included a kind of asynchronous learning using the campus closed-circuit TV system. We’ve come a long way with the new J.D McKean Library and it continues our long-standing tradition of using all formats available to accomplish our mission of promoting deep learning.”