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So. You want differences? Here's a difference for you:
Re: university libraries in Germany and Britain (or make that Frankfurt and Birmingham), respectively:
Frankfurt: lots of different books, pretty specialised, single or few copies.
Birmingham: fewer different books, mostly textbooks, multiple copies (five, ten, even twenty of each).
The Birmingham model probably does not make a good research library, but for students, common students who are just beginning to get into a subject, and aren't likely to do much in-depth study of specialised subjects, the Birmingham university library makes a lot more sense than the Frankfurt one. You can actually borrow basic textbooks there, because there are *multiple* copies - you don't have to copy each frelling book so that the original remains available to other students. You have a wide variety of basic textbooks, plus a few specialised standard works, all of which make eminent sense for a student to read. In the Birmingham library, I can actually just go to the archaeology section, select a book, and be pretty certain that reading it makes sense for my studies and that it will not bury me under an avalanche of descriptions of sherds or similarly useless information.
I think I'm going to spend a lot of time there.
Frankfurt: lots of different books, pretty specialised, single or few copies.
Birmingham: fewer different books, mostly textbooks, multiple copies (five, ten, even twenty of each).
The Birmingham model probably does not make a good research library, but for students, common students who are just beginning to get into a subject, and aren't likely to do much in-depth study of specialised subjects, the Birmingham university library makes a lot more sense than the Frankfurt one. You can actually borrow basic textbooks there, because there are *multiple* copies - you don't have to copy each frelling book so that the original remains available to other students. You have a wide variety of basic textbooks, plus a few specialised standard works, all of which make eminent sense for a student to read. In the Birmingham library, I can actually just go to the archaeology section, select a book, and be pretty certain that reading it makes sense for my studies and that it will not bury me under an avalanche of descriptions of sherds or similarly useless information.
I think I'm going to spend a lot of time there.
no subject
That's something I missed when I started to study the law here in Germany. I borrowed lots of books and was disappointed because they didn't fit to what needed right then. Luckily, we have lots of copies in our library so that I didn't had to copy each of them.
I hope that you'll have a lot of time to read the books.