It will not carry passengers into Outer Space, so far as we know. But from all appearances, the James B. Hunt Jr. library on N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus is space-age in the digital world at least. Slated to open Jan. 2, the new library is beyond state of the art. Books are stored and retrieved by robot, but students and others using the massive facility will do a lot of work on hundreds if not thousands of video screens.

There are names for places not before used in libraries: a Creativity Studio with sliding and rotating walls, a Teaching and Visualization Lab where it’s possible, The News & Observer’s Jay Price reports, to create a virtual bridge of a warship.

For university students, the library means they are akin to the mates on the Starship Enterprise, going in the library world “where no man (or woman) has gone before.” There would be few arguments that the library is not the most advanced of its kind anywhere. And, the university now will draw more students on daily assignments to Centennial, a cutting-edge public-private partnership campus. May it live long and prosper.