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Study areas and group study rooms in the library

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Is there a peaceful secluded place in the library to regroup and organize notes between classes? Looking for a convenient place to meet with your study group and start preparing for exams?

For quieter individualized studying, the lower level of the library has six individual carrels tucked away from the hubbub of the school. They are deep enough to spread out your notes and books. Since study carrels may not be reserved for use if you see an open one, it is available for use. The ground rules for carrel and study table use are found here.

The lower level also has several soft chairs for more comfortable seating while tackling those reading assignments. The two student computers on this level may be used to access the libraries catalog or any of the the law library’s online research resources. This area of the library is more conducive to quiet work because of the location. Hallway conversations, the usual traffic of classes changing or law  library use is minimal on this level.

Between classes, free time during the day or weekends may be a good time for you to gather with the study group. For collaborative study, the library has five group study rooms available. The size and occupancy for study rooms vary from five to twelve people in a room.

To ensure study room availability, reserve it through the library as soon as you set a meeting time. Reservations may be made by library staff, at the Library service desk, in person, or by using this email DickinsonLawLib@psu.edu or by calling the circulation desk (717-240-5267) during business hours.  The process for reserving rooms is listed on the Library’s page under study spaces.

All study rooms have Solstice which provides collaborative sharing of information for the study group to participate. Instructions for using Solstice use are posted in each room. Study groups will have priority over individual student use of these rooms during the week before and during exams.

Relevant information to keep in mind in the reserving and the use of study rooms:

  • There must be a group of two or more students to reserve a room.
    • The names of students and user IDs (abc123) when reserving the room will be required.
  • Rooms can be reserved for one 2-hour time block.
  • One renewal of 2 hours may be made if there are no subsequent reservations.
  • Reservations can be made up to 24 hours in advance.
  • Users without reservations must vacate the room when a group with a reservation arrives.
  • If a room is reserved and is not claimed within 10 minutes of time held, others may use it.
  • All rules concerning food and drink in the library also apply to the Group Study Rooms.
  • Per library policy, including group study rooms, “Carrels and tables are not personal property. Carrel or table space may not be claimed for an extended period of time without actually occupying the seat. Carrels and tables will be cleared of ALL unattended items periodically throughout the day.
  • Masking is required when using study rooms as well as wiping touched surfaces when leaving the room.

Whether a quiet study student or study group participant, please be considerate of others. Keep conversations and noise to a minimum throughout the Law Library.  Cell phones should be turned off or muted while you are in the Law Library.

As exams approach, these spaces can be most beneficial to quiet and collective studying. If you need assistance with any library services, please contact the staff at the library service desk.

 

A History of Daylight Saving Time

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Daylight Saving Time [DST] begins at 2am every year on the “second Sunday in March.” This year on March 14 at 2am, most of the U.S. will set their clocks forward to 3am. However, until Congress began legislating this issue, every municipality determined its own local time based on the location of the sun. Calculating time based on the fluctuations of sunrise and sunset, as well as the will of a multitude of elected officials, meant that knowing the time with certainty in a given region was next to impossible. Yet, with the rise of intercontinental railroads, standard, consistent time became a necessity.

November 18, 1883, known as “The Day with Two Noons,” was the first successful attempt at organizing consistent, standardized time across the U.S.—sometimes called Standard Railway Time; this was done in order to safely schedule train track usage and to take advantage of mechanical clocks to keep local time. In 1884, the U.S. hosted world leaders at the International Meridian Conference to discuss “a common initial meridian … and ultimately to standardize time worldwide.” The result was that the time zone in which the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, England sits, which had customarily been treated as the zero meridian, was officially designated as longitudinal midnight, and the rest of the world was divided into 23 remaining time zones spaced in 15° longitudinal increments from Greenwich Mean Time.

The U.S. did not adopt Daylight Saving Time until the March 19, 1918, “Standard Time Act” (40 Stat. 450).  (The Act was modified in 1921 to transfer all of Texas and Oklahoma into the same, Central, time zone.) This legislation, adopted during the last year of WWI, mirrored the European desire to conserve energy as part of the war effort. The codification divided the U.S. into 5 time zones including the Territory of Alaska and established DST as the period from 2am on the last Sunday of March (springing forward an hour) until 2am the last Sunday of October (falling back an hour).  The U.S. eventually repealed this law  in 1919, but a number of cities maintained the DST practice while many farms and rural areas returned to standard time.

After entering WWII, the U.S. again instituted Daylight Saving Time, under the War Time Act (56 Stat. 9). On January 20, 1942, Congress set DST to begin at 2am (springing forward) on the “twentieth day after the date of enactment of this Act.” It further declared that the end of daylight saving would occur on the last Sunday of the month “six months after the termination of the present war,” or earlier should Congress decide; and incorporated the time zones established by the 1918 Act. DST began at 2am on Monday, February 9, 1942 and ended at 2 am Sunday, September 30, 1945.

After the war, the country again devolved into a hodgepodge of competing time zones within the same region or state, with some cities and states employing DST, but beginning and ending on conflicting days, and some states and rural areas maintaining standard time within the same regions and time zones. Because of the impact on transportation and interstate commerce, the 1966 Uniform Time Act was passed (80 Stat. 107). Its purpose was “to promote the adoption and observance of uniform time” with DST legislated to last from 2am on the last Sunday of April until 2am on the last Sunday of October. The Act further set out eight time zones across the U.S. and its territories, required states to formally opt out of DST rather than not comply at all, and authorized the Interstate Commerce Commission to bring any violators of the law to court.

Since 1968, the Congress has passed a number of acts regarding Daylight Saving Time. This includes the experiment of requiring full-time DST from January 1974 – April 1975, as well as moving the start date to the beginning of April. It was in 2005 that Congress legislated that the current DST  would begin on the second Sunday in March, and end on the first Sunday of November (119 Stat. 594).

DST is not necessarily a settled issue in the U.S. From the beginning, many sued the government because they felt such legislation was governmental overreach. And not every part of the U.S. complies with the law. Hawaii and Arizona (except for the Navajo Nation), and the territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands have opted out of DST, maintaining standard time. According the National Conference of State Legislatures, a number of states would like to permanently observe DST, having passed and proposed such laws within their state legislatures. However, these state laws cannot take effect until there is an amendment to the current federal legislation, which only allows states to maintain standard time but not elect fulltime DST.

Until those laws are changed, don’t forget to set your clocks this Sunday, March 14, according to your state’s observance Daylight Saving Time.

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