DATE: Thursday, September 18, 1997          TAG: 9709180331

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   63 lines

ODU LIBRARIANS PUT THEIR FINGERS IN THEIR EARS, NOT TO THEIR LIPS

The woman sitting at the information desk inside Old Dominion University's library had her fingers in her ears. Students grimaced as they entered the building. The stair railings shook.

Normally, library patrons might complain about loud whispering. At ODU recently, they had to yell over the rat-a-tat-tat of a jackhammer.

A jackhammer. Inside the library.

``Irritating,'' said Tira Higgins, a junior from Chesapeake trying to study Tuesday on the second floor.

Try deafening.

It's a price of progress. Workers were tearing up first-floor concrete as part of a $12.2 million renovation and expansion. When completed - in February, it's hoped - the work will increase the size of the library by 42 percent, to almost 209,000 square feet. The expansion will provide shelving for its growing collections for up to 20 years, seating for a quarter of ODU's 18,000 students and modern info-finding technology.

It has been an unusually noisy library since summer, its only separation from a full-blown construction site being plywood and plastic barriers.

The recent jackhammering, which ended Tuesday, was a high point. Or low point. It drove some students to leave. But many others put up with the daylong racket. Term-paper due dates don't care about jackhammers. Commuters need a place to study between classes.

Librarian Jean A. Major called the students ``remarkably'' cooperative.

The jackhammer Tuesday was beneath her office. ``Sort of intrusive,'' she allowed.

Kristie Hebert would agree. The graduate student from Norfolk was trying to study for a statistics quiz, a pained look on her face.

``They stop for a half-hour at lunchtime,'' she said. ``You just try to ignore it.''

Does that work?

``Kind of. If it keeps going, you don't notice it.''

The jackhammer was a duller roar up in the third-floor ``silent study'' area. But roar it did, despite signs reading ``Thank You for Observing Silence.''

``It was worse in the summer,'' said Aaron Stallings, a junior from Portsmouth reading, appropriately, a book on environmental health. ``That doesn't bother me as much as people talking. . . . It just kind of becomes background noise after awhile.''

Library staffer Beverly Barco didn't put her fingers in her ears when she replaced the woman at the information desk. Barco instead used what had to be one of the strangest equipment issues in the history of libraries: yellow ear plugs.

``I can't stand the noise,'' Barco said, making a face.

Upstairs, students leaned in closely as a computer instructor tried to talk over the jackhammer. Grant Phisher, a junior from Virginia Beach, hunted but failed to find a quieter spot to study for the two hours before his algebra test.

``It's hard to concentrate,'' he said.

Phisher didn't have to convince fellow student Higgins. The pounding jackhammer had given life to the books and notecards from her psychology class spread in front of her.

``I'm actually studying tension: the viability of concentrating on two things at one time,'' she said.

What had she learned?

``I can't do this. I'm getting ready to leave.''

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