A new pharmacy building on Kansas University’s West Campus will feature a museum, cafeteria and other amenities, KU’s dean of the School of Pharmacy told Lawrence Rotarians Monday.

Dean Ken Audus updated the group on the status of the $45 million building, which has been delayed by the wet summer.

Audus said the plans for the building call for a cafeteria space, allowing for the first such food service area on KU’s West Campus. Other planned spaces include a pharmacy museum, which will include an old-time soda fountain.

A pharmacy is planned for the building, which Audus said would serve KU students, faculty and staff, so as not to compete with other pharmacies in the area. That pharmacy may use automated technology, including tele-pharmacy, he said. That’s similar to a U.S. Navy setup in San Diego where pharmacists there relay information to technicians on ships at sea, who fill the prescriptions for sailors.

The features are all part of the ongoing development of the new building, which will serve primarily as a home for the pharmacy school, which will move to the West Campus from its current home in Malott Hall.

The school is still hoping to open the building by August 2010.

Audus said the building — along with a $5 million expansion of space in Wichita — would allow the school to nearly double its existing student capacity, and to further address the ongoing pharmacist shortage in the state of Kansas. Using the most up-to-date figures available, Audus said six counties in Kansas lack a pharmacist, while 32 counties have only one pharmacist.

Some 36 million prescriptions are filled annually in Kansas.

“That’s a lot of prescriptions, and that requires folks to fill those prescriptions,” Audus said.