Students and faculty suffering from the noise of Berry Library construction will have to deal with another minor inconvenience next week -- limited access to the stacks.
As Berry library assumes a vertical shape over the next two months, part of the construction will intrude on the annex of Baker library.
This week, construction crews will finish drilling holes for the structural steel columns in the floor of Baker's annex , which contains part of the library's book collection and covers approximately half of the stack area, according to John Crane, director of library administrative services.
As a safety precaution, the annex portion of Baker Library will be closed to students and staff from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week, Crane said. The annex will reopen in the evenings.
But the library is beginning to take on a visible shape, and the vertical steel structure of the building will be erected during April and May.
"The construction is well under way," Crane said.
Construction is still on schedule to finish in June 2000. After working on the building's foundation over interim, the workers are expected to finish pouring the first phase of the concrete foundation this week, Crane said.
Berry will eventually connect with Baker Library, but the sections currently under construction must be finished before the connection can be made.
For the connection, a new roof will be built over the existing roof of the Baker annex and new steel columns will be dropped into it. Then the old roof will be removed and the fourth floor of the annex will be joined with the main floor of Berry, Assistant Director of Facilities Planning Reed Bergwall told The Dartmouth earlier this year.
Computing Services and almost all of the Library Services should be moved into Berry Library by Summer term, 2000, Crane said. Between the Summer term and December 2000, Kiewit Computation Center will be torn down and Carson, the academic wing of Berry Library, will be constructed.
Berry must be functional at this point so Kiewit workers and machines can be relocated there, Bergwall added.
"As soon as Berry is done, then we can shift people out of Kiewit so we can demolish it before we build Carson," he said earlier this year. "Some people will go into Berry and some will go into Gerry."
During the process of erecting the steel columns, the number of workers on the site should increase from between 30 and 40 up to 100 by Summer term, Berwall said. He added that while pedestrian traffic of students coming from or going to the science buildings might be affected during the steel structure construction, the construction crews are "cognizant of class changing times."
The best views of those parts of Berry Library currently in place can be seen from level four of the Baker Library annex, behind the circulation desk, Crane said. While most of the windows are covered, one window was left open for curious students to watch the progression of the construction process.
