Diary, opening hours and closures Termine und Schließzeiten, Stand 18. September 2026
Since the reduction of the Institute's budget, which took effect on 1 January 2026, this page does more work than it used to. The house colloquium is suspended, no colloquium proper is being held, and the reading room opens two days a week by written appointment. What follows is the present state of things: the days and hours, the closures to the end of the year, the internal meetings, and what a visitor needs to know. The decisions behind the reduction are set out in History of the Institute.
The three things that have changed. One: the reading room and the reference library open on Wednesday and Thursday, 10.00–15.30, and material is produced only against a written appointment confirmed in advance. Two: the fortnightly house colloquium and the biennial colloquium are suspended; no public event is scheduled for 2026, and the thirteenth colloquium has been postponed without a new date. Three: the academic office is staffed by two people — it always was — but they now also cover the work of the posts that stand vacant, so a written answer takes up to twenty working days instead of ten. Nothing is refused because of this; it simply takes longer.
1. Opening hours from 1 January 2026
| Department | Hours | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Reading room and reference library | Wednesday and Thursday, 10.00–15.30 | No interval at midday. Consultation only against a written appointment; material is produced between 10.00 and 15.00, so that everything is back in the store by the time the Institute closes. |
| Academic office | Monday to Thursday 9.15–15.45, Friday 9.15–12.30 | Unchanged. The office is the first place to write to about anything at all. |
| Laboratory, Division VI | Wednesday 10.00–15.00 | By appointment. The second laboratory post has been vacant since July 2025, so only work already agreed can be carried out. |
| Document repair workshop | Wednesday 10.00–14.00 | Chiefly for advice; treatment continues on the Institute's own and its partners' holdings. |
| Division V, documentation | no public counter | One post; there is no longer a member of staff free to receive visitors in the documentation room. Image files already captured are still supplied on application. |
| Closed | Public holidays; 21 December 2026 to 3 January 2027 | Exceptional closures are posted here and everyone with an appointment is written to. |
2. Closures to the end of 2026
| Period | What is closed | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Thu 24 Sep 2026 | Reading room | The annual inspection of the strongroom and of the fire equipment, which is done by an outside firm and cannot be moved. |
| Wed 7 Oct 2026 | Reading room | Stock-taking and cleaning of the attic store, which now takes a single day because it is done by fewer hands. |
| Wed 4 and Thu 5 Nov 2026 | Reading room and laboratory | The heating plant is serviced; the building is without heat for the two days. |
| Wed 2 Dec 2026 | Reading room | The second of the year's two stock-takings of the card indexes. |
| 21 Dec 2026 to 3 Jan 2027 | The whole Institute | The annual closure. Correspondence received in this period is dealt with from 5 January 2027. |
| 24 and 31 Dec 2026 | The whole Institute | The days before public holidays; the duty officer answers the telephone only. |
| Fri 25 and Sat 26 Dec 2026 | The whole Institute | Public holidays. |
The reading room also remains closed on the days when the two members of the academic office are both absent, which happens perhaps four times a year; intending visitors are told when the appointment is confirmed, and no appointment is ever made for such a day.
3. Public events
There are none to announce. The house colloquium, which met 418 times between 1959 and December 2024, was reduced to a monthly meeting in 2025 and suspended at the end of that year, its last meeting having been on 11 December 2024; the thirteenth colloquium, announced for September 2025 and then put back to September 2026, has been postponed without a new date, and the twelfth colloquium's proceedings remain unpublished. Papers already offered for the thirteenth are held on file and their authors have been written to individually. If the Institute's circumstances allow, a fourteenth colloquium will be considered for 2028.
The parallel arrangements are also in abeyance: the open afternoon in the repair workshop, which had been held five times, and the reading courses for students, which were given jointly with two universities. The Institute has told both universities that it will let them know if the courses can be resumed; it does not expect to be able to offer them before the winter term of 2027/28.
4. Internal meetings
| Date | Meeting | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| First Tuesday of the month, 9.30–11.00 | Conference of the Institute | Unchanged, and now the place where the reductions are reviewed month by month; the minutes are filed as before. |
| Thu 1 Oct 2026 | Publications committee | Considers the proof of series volume 37 (Hildesheim monastery charters, volume 2), which has been at the printer since June, and the order in which the three works in hand will be issued. |
| Thu 12 Nov 2026 | Meeting with the DFG project group | With the Department of History at Leibniz University Hannover; the project has been extended by one year, to the end of 2028, and the meeting settles the revised timetable. |
| Tue 15 Dec 2026 | Annual review of work | Divisions submit their accounts of the year, which will appear in Mitteilungen no. 63, expected in the second half of 2027. |
5. For visitors
- Write first. Since January 2026 no one is received in the reading room without an appointment confirmed in writing, because the material has to be fetched and a place kept by one of two people. Write to benutzung [at] winddew.lab and allow five working days.
- Register on arrival. Sign in at the academic office on the ground floor of the main building and collect a reader's ticket for the day.
- Coats and bags go into the lockers in the hall. Pencils are provided; ink pens are not brought in.
- Photography for private research, without flash, is still permitted if it is registered on arrival, as before. There is no charge.
- If you have an appointment and cannot come, say so the day before. Material will have been fetched and a place kept; a reader who fails to appear without word is asked to explain before another appointment is made.
- School and student groups cannot be received for the present. The Institute hopes to offer the usual hour again when it has the staff to spare, and will say so on this page.
Standing practice for the colloquium (decided by the conference in 1996, now in abeyance)
One: no verbatim record is made; the minute gives the title, the speaker and not more than three points from the
discussion.
Two: unpublished material shown by a speaker is not quoted without permission, by members of the Institute as much as
by anyone else.
Three: there is no chairman's introduction and no closing speech. The paper begins at 14.15 and the hour is kept.
Four: at the last colloquium of the year the academic office gives an account of the year's work; that spoken account
is the draft of the annual report printed in the following Mitteilungen.
None of this has been repealed; it is simply not being applied, there being no meetings to apply it to. The record of the 418 meetings up to December 2024 remains in the colloquium register (archive, KOL-1).
Compiled by the academic office and now revised twice a year, in March and September, instead of quarterly. Where a closure or a date changes in the meantime, this page is still the notice of record, and it is corrected even if nothing else on the site is.
Page WI-VER-01 · compiled by M. Tiedemann · read by the director's office · last modified 18 September 2026