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No longer obscured from public view, Liberty University's new bookstore will open front and center this Saturday.

"Part of the goal of the university and Barnes & Noble was to open this up to the community at large," said Len Scoggins, regional manager of Barnes & Noble college bookstores in Virginia.

The previous 6,000-square-foot store stood tucked away inside the college's DeMoss Hall, with another smaller store for graduate students located inside Campus North. But the new two-story, 20,000-square-foot Jeffersonian building welcomes visitors as they approach the main hub of campus along University Boulevard.

Along with textbooks, school supplies and book buyback on the bottom floor, Scoggins said the store's top floor will include about 15,000 titles in a "hybrid" of Christian and religious works, plus other general reading titles.

"The way that we develop our bookstores is to cater to the campus that we're on," he said, adding that the store does have a "strong emphasis" on Christian titles and, of course, Liberty regalia.

But it also includes other sections expected in a bookstore, such as business, children's books, fiction, home reference, cooking, current affairs, history and bargain books.

The store also has a cafe that serves Starbucks coffee.

In the past few weeks, bookstore employees and contractors have been putting the finishing touches on the store, both inside and out.

This and last week, workers focused on paving the parking lot, installing signs and sidewalk rails, finishing landscaping and unloading stock. Final details include stocking the store and cleaning it up.

"We're getting everything up and out on the floor," store manager Ellen Mayes said. "We hope to open to a large crowd."

The school and Barnes & Noble shared the cost of roughly $2.5 million to build the new store, said Charles Spence, director of planning and new construction at Liberty. That does not include the cost for startup merchandise, he said.

Lee Beaumont, LU's director of auxiliary services, said the school also is working to complete several other large-ticket items in the coming months.

The school's Snowflex ski slope has been delayed from "horrible" weather, he said, but probably will open in late July.

An indoor soccer complex with two fields of artificial grass are on track to open in early May, he said.