I love libraries. Especially those where you can keep the books for a long time.

Having studied in Bamberg, I grew used to the wonderful library there, with very friendly librarians, good light, lots of tables (and in the archaeologists' library building, with a wonderful view included) and very kind and fast service. There's the "book of wishes", for example: If you miss a book in the catalogue and think that the library should have it, you write it into the book, and most of the times, it gets ordered. (And then you get that wonderful book with a slip of paper between the pages, saying "Your Name" and "Erstausleihe" (first loan).) Thank you, TB 5 in Bamberg!

The library in Erlangen, on the other hand, has not too many books for my research. And those they have are all scattered across town, standing in smaller library rooms with often reduced opening times. A lot of those books can't be checked out. There's only one Erlangen feature I miss in Bamberg: You get an automatic email notification once your book is nearing the end of checkout time. Nevertheless, this wonderful feature won't help anything if the book can't be checked out.

And that is the main reason I'm still going to Bamberg now and again: The wonderful library. (I don't mind at all that it also gives me the chance to have coffee and a chat with friends and colleagues there, too, during much-needed library breaks.) And today is library day, so I'm on my way to the car, lugging along a stack of books that need to be returned (or, in some cases, checked out again). And I'll come back home with even more books.

I really enjoyed the last two days and today. It is pretty wintery at the moment, with low temperatures, and we had wonderful weather yesterday - just the right weather for a bike ride to the Christmas Market in Fürth.

Winter is nice when the air is cold and crisp, and I like the singing of the bicycle spike tires on the cold streets. Nights with spice cakes and chocolate and tea, maybe with some candles burning. Book buying binges (that I'm especially prone to in winter time). Strolling through a christmas market. Riding a sleigh down the small hill close to our home. Evenings in front of the fireplace. Roleplaying sessions in the warm room when it's cold outside. Snuggling up with a good book somewhere (the book buying binges come in here). Baking (and eating) cookies. Finding presents for friends and family that are utterly pleasant surprises. Visits at the spa where you can swim in the outdoor pool - the pool water all hot while the air is so cold that you think your nose will freeze off. Hot chocolate. Chick flicks and christmas-time movies (especially "3 Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel", the Czech version of Cinderella filmed in the 70s)... Winter Goodness.

I have made a resolution to do some academic housekeeping (a.k.a. filing of papers) every day to reduce the huge stack of copied papers that are still left from the time of thesis-writing. Since filing here means taking the paper and typing all the necessary data like author, editor, title, year, journal or book title, ... into my database before actually punching holes into the sheets and binding them together and physically filing them, this is not one of my favourite jobs - it can get pretty tedious after a while. At the moment, I am filing mostly papers written in Czech, which means "after a while" translates as "after the third or fourth article". Even with a keyboard heavily altered to include almost all special characters that are needed for writing Czech, Polish, French, and the Scandinavian languages, getting all the words typed out correctly is taking a lot of concentration.

Yet keeping such a database is a huge help when looking for that "something I once read somewhere", not to speak of citing things in papers and articles. I would not want to be without that database - I am using Endnote, but if you are looking for a literature database, you might want to look at Zotero, a free plugin for Firefox doing the same job as Endnote. I bought the commercial programme a few years ago because it included an add-in for MS Word, and there was no alternative product on the market. I was convinced before buying that adding references to texts with a flick of the finger really is something, and I never regretted buying the software. Even better if you can get the same functionality for free nowadays!

So now I'm tackling the paper stack three or four papers at a time, and I'm looking forward to the day in the future when all the sheets have been filed into one of my file folders. And I hope it will come soon!