UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The end of the 2015 fall semester finds most of the student population at Penn State engaged in that culminating ritual of every college course, no matter what topic or discipline — final exams, a rite of passage as old as universities themselves.
Libraries often provide students a "second home" for this intense, cyclical activity, a mutually supportive gathering place to study and socialize — just like in this circa-1908 photograph of students at reading tables in Carnegie Library, on the University Park campus, only about five years after it was built.
This week, most of the nearly 97,500 undergraduate and graduate students Universitywide, more than 46,800 of them at University Park, are preparing for various end-of-semester activities by writing papers, giving presentations, and hitting the books in order to review and present what they have learned over the course of the previous semester.