Christchurch City Libraries Blog

Baby O is a opera experience aimed at babies, which had its New Zealand debut at the Christchurch Arts Festival. I went along to the first session with my son and it was magic! Sparkly fish, stomping gumboots and chewable rubber duckies totally captivated the under-one audience.

If you are keen for your child to be exposed to some classical music, then jump on the catalogue and look at some of these CDs aimed at baby boppers. It’s free to reserve things for your children on their card, so if you don’t have a PIN set up on their card, just call us on 941-7923 and we can set one up for you.

• Music for Babies is a CD of baby friendly classics – Clair De Lune , Fantasia on Greensleeves and the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy amongst others.
• The cringingly named, but lovely to listen to, “So Smart!” series has three CDs, all presenting classical music for different occasions, sleep, play and car rides.
• We have heaps of lullaby CDs, a lot of which are classical music based, as well as a lovely NZ Made CD; Sleep to the Ocean’s Heartbeat which features, waves, sounds of our environment and heartbeats.
• Say Hello to the Opera is a comprehensive children’s introduction to Opera and its companion Say Hello to the Orchestra performs the same role for the orchestra.
• If there is a certain composer you wish to focus on, then simply search the catalogue for Music for infants and then the composer’s name. Omit the composer’s name if you would like to see our full selection of music for babies and toddlers.
• For a fun and free baby music experience – why not come along to our Baby Times? They are offered at almost all of our Libraries and are a great chance to learn some songs and meet with other parents and babies.

If you have a musical genre you enjoy, you don’t need to specially seek out children’s versions of it. Your baby loves listening to any music that you enjoy too, so crank it up, your baby won’t even mind if you sing along.

Want to be able to say more than just “guten tag” in German? Check out these awesome resources and start talking like you were born in Germany!

• Borrow  a German language multimedia set from one of our community libraries now open so you can practice anywhere;
• We also have German dictionaries (including one you can access online from home!) and books about Germany;
• One of the best ways to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it – read books and magazine articles written in German, watch German films (I can personally recommend North Face, The Lives of Others, The Counterfeiters, Good Bye Lenin! and Run Lola Run),  and listen to German music;
• Find articles about places in Germany, as well as German history and culture, at Student Resource Center;
• Learn about notable German people and more at WorldBook Online InfoFinder;
• Explore travel and tourism websites – we’ve brought all the best ones together in one place to make it easy for you;
• Earn an excellence in NCEA German with help from NZQA;
• The BBC makes learning German easy;
• Find pen pals you can write to in Germany at Deutsch-Lernen.com;
• Make learning German fun – play games at Digital Dialects;
• Keen to visit or live in Germany for a while? Win yourself a student-exchange scholarship;
• GoAbroad.com and Youth For Understanding also offer travel opportunities for high school students;
• Get travel tips from Lonely Planet;
• The German National Tourist Board can help you decide where you’ll go and what you’ll do;

Want some more really useful resources for another NCEA subject? Go to The Pulse, the library’s website for teens.

One of the post-earthquake jokes that has been circulating is: You know you’re from Christchurch when there are university students congregating in your street and no-one is calling the police. University students are now synonymous with good works and schemes. And Christchurch City Libraries’ customers have been the happy recipient of a good deed from the tertiary fairy godmothers.

Eighteen lucky library customers were able to attend Baby Opera at the Christchurch Arts Festival last Sunday thanks to the fundraising of some University of Canterbury students. As part of their Management paper, the students had to arrange a community event that benefits people affected by the earthquake. Atawhai Murray, the project leader, decided it would be nice to send some library customers to the Scottish opera session at the Festival.

Funds were obtained from a local church trust and other sponsors. They went towards tickets, a Te Reo handbook and a shoebox of love. A prize draw was held at each Baby Time session around the library network. Margaret Clune from our Events team was pleased to be able to offer such a positive gesture to customers, and worked hard to distribute entry forms and inform each lucky winner of their success.

There were many fathers attending with their children, making it a special Father’s Day occasion. Comments were glowing and many spoke of the wonderful blend of fun and learning. A mother of three said it was lovely to see something new and fresh for little ones.

Some of our Children’s Librarians were also able to attend as part of their professional development,  and they reported that it was very interactive and perfectly targeted for babies. It also gives parents good ideas of things they can do themselves at home. Customers were given a take home pack with a CD.

• View more photos from the event

More for babies and young children

Despite some libraries being closed, there are still at least twenty free Baby and Story Time sessions being offered. The Families Outreach librarian is offering weekly sessions at several locations in Sumner and  arrangements are being made to offer sessions at South City Mall. Baby Time  caters to under twos. It has age-appropriate songs and activities, taken by highly trained library staff.

Story Times incorporates more early literacy activities and prepares children to read, while still offering lots of songs and fun.

The library website offers plenty of good advice for parents of young children and if your child is about to turn four years old visit any library and pick up your free Ready for reading birthday pack.

I must admit I’m not the worlds greatest op-shopper. To me, op-shops are associated with crazy old ladies who talk to themselves and buy clothes that no one in their right mind would want. That was until I met Leone. Leone is the world’s greatest op shopper. She can walk into an op-shop with $20.00 and walk out with either a new outfit or something she knows she can renovate into something more her style. She will even have some change. I always wondered how she did it.

It turns out we have some great tips on op-shopping on our Pulse website .  The two best pieces of advice I found were – take cash and be prepared to hunt. My first attempt was pretty hopeless. I found a necklace  with some loose beads. I could wear it as is, or I could ask a bead making friend to re-make it into something new. In the next, I make an interesting discovery – Op-shops have sales.  All clothing half price and here I strike gold. Two shirts for $5.00 and a skirt that has a small stain on it. If I can wash the stain out, that will be good, but if not, I’ll unpick the skirt and put a new piece in. That is the advantage of owning a sewing machine. We also have some books that have good ideas for altering clothing. For those who really can’t sew, try trading your baking/child-minding/tutoring skills of some funky clothing.

LegalTrac provides indexing to more than 1,000 major law reviews, legal newspapers, law journals and specialty publications. It also has access to over 200 full text journals. This makes it an ideal electronic resource for:

• Students of law, law enforcement or social work;
• Legal researchers;
• Law school faculty;
• Women who like to prove they are right.

Each title included in this resource is selected on the basis of criteria provided by a special advisory committee of the American Association of Law Libraries.  Included in their selection is a number of New Zealand titles. See the full title list here [210 kb PDF]

LegalTrac and many other useful legal electronic resources can be found in the Source. Access this from home with your library card number and PIN, or at our open community libraries.

Some of the destruction by earthquake at Cheviot, North Canterbury, 16 Nov. 1901

William Ellison Burke wrote a gossipy journal in the early days of Canterbury settlement. He has quite a bit in common with us:

An earthquake. My chums were asleep in a whare and I shook them up. The slab rafters were moving merrily. The shock was severe and probably the wet Swampy nature of the country, had something to do with it.

Jane Deans wrote in 1869:

It came as they usually do, without warning. A loud report like a cannon ball hitting the house, then a long rumbling noise like a long, heavy train passing over a wooden bridge, shaking violently all the time.

Her diaries and letters were mentioned in The Press article Quake sounds familiar, and her great-great-grandson Charles said:

It’s remarkable how emotive it is. It’s just so similar to what we are hearing time and time again now. We are living the same fear, worry and concern that she was back then … It is not just our generation that is going through this … The city has recovered before and it will again.

Since September 4 2010, we have learned about disasters, preparedness, geology and seismology. And loss. But we’ve also discovered that in sharing stories, a powerful link is made – one that cuts across time and place.

So think about writing your story – for now, but also for the future. We’d love you to share your stories and photos with us.

Other places to tell your story:

• When my home shook
• Quake stories
• Christchurch earthquake journal

What can you say about a guy who stands on the land formerly occupied by his house (which had to be demolished following the September 2010 earthquake) and, using a paper report and his surviving pizza oven, explains how new houses can be safely built in Christchurch? Make some more explanatory YouTube videos please.

Well Dr Jan Kupec, chief geotechnical engineer with CERA  has done just that – so far he has three on YouTube. The other topics are liquefaction and sinkholes. Many of us will be familiar with both phenomenons.

Other organisations are getting smart and using YouTube too. Missed the International Speaker series ? – soon videos will be available here.

There is a wealth of information being supplied to help Cantabrians understand more about earthquakes and faultlines. Dr Mark Quigley of the University of Canterbury has been a popular voice in explaining the events.

The City Plan website also has a video tour of the central city which allows you to explore the changing landscape in detail.

See also:

• Our earthquakes page
• Our list of websites on the earthquakes
• Future shock: Nine lessons to learn from Canterbury

Some new music spotted recently on our music buyer’s desk:

• Wellington World Music Collection – first in a series of locally produced music in traditional and contemporary world music styles.
• Webb Sisters – you know them already if you were lucky enough to go to the Leonard Cohen concert …  Graham Reid reviews the album Savages as “a curiously unaffecting album where 80s pop-rock (think Stevie Nicks on the title track) sits uneasily alongside material such as Baroque Thoughts and the clunking lyrics of Words That Mobilise which are grounded in anglofolk” … but actually that combination sounds appealing.
• Watch the Throne – Jay-Z and Kanye West. I wasn’t too excited until I read Alexis Petridis in The Guardian: “There are unlikely samples. No Church in the Wild sets Frank Ocean’s haunting vocal against Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera playing a tricksy prog riff.”

Find new music at Christchurch City Libraries

• New CDs at our libraries
• The Source, which is available to library members, includes several sources of streaming music and music downloads such as Music Online and Naxos Music Library as well as reference resources.

Having trouble getting your tongue around NCEA Latin? Christchurch City Libraries is here to help!

• Search for all things Latin in Encyclopædia Britannica;
• WorldBook Online InfoFinder is another great place to look for relevant articles;
• Borrow a Latin dictionary from one of our community libraries now open;
• You can also access Latin dictionaries online at Credo Reference or Oxford Reference using your library card and PIN;
• Find official information and resources for NCEA Latin on the NZQA website;
• Learn about Roman history and culture, play games, and check out other helpful Latin reference tools on Latinata.com;
• Test your vocabulary at Kepheus.

Want some more really useful resources for another NCEA subject? Go to The Pulse, the library’s website for teens.

Another day, another piece of happy, thanks to the Press Christchurch Writers Festival.  It’s Wednesday afternoon, and I’m heading home full of summer pudding and chocolate chip torte, thinking not What’s for Pudding (Alexa Johnston’s most recent recipe book), but what’s for tea.  Whatever it turns out to be, it doesn’t have a hope of matching the roll-call of dishes we’ve just all been discussing.

Lemon delicious, golden syrup steamed pudding, jam roly-poly, rhubarb crumble – all names guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye and a rumble to the tummy.  There’s bucket-loads of nostalgia in the room, although there are also ambivalent sounds when some of the more contentious puddings are mentioned.  Seems that junket, flummery and blancmange carry fewer happy memories for some, and Alexa floats her theory that those who attended boarding school and who were fed lots of institutional milk and egg-style puddings were so traumatised by the experience that even the mention of rice pudding turns them slightly green.

Chair Kate Fraser notes that when she was at boarding school, they had ‘pudding’ during the week, but ‘dessert’ at the weekends, and asks Alexa what the difference IS between the two.  None, says Alexa – she believes the word ‘dessert’ is an American affectation supposed to make pudding sound more sophisticated and exotic.  She also notes that there is truly nothing better in the world than “a pudding made with love by your mother”.

Alexa has brought with her a selection of her favourite Canterbury cookbooks, which range in era from the 1920s right through to modern ones, and explains how she has chosen the recipes for this most recent book.  She sees herself not as an inventor of recipes, but as a transmitter of wisdom, and after (very unscientifically) interviewing a bunch of people, she gathered a list of dishes, then set about finding the best recipe for each pudding.  Turns out that writing a cook book is much more about statistics and spreadsheets than I’d imagined, although each recipe is thoroughly road-tested – a necessary evil when some of the instructions in older books are simply a list of ingredients followed by the words “combine as usual”.  Older recipe books assumed knowledge because everyone DID actually know, so it can be quite hard to tease out methods and get the right result.

The session is glorious, the book a thing of beauty, the audience buy-in 150%, and Alexa and Kate are both great speakers.  Alexa’s background as art curator and Kate’s long-standing career as foodie writer and author combine to make a great afternoon’s entertainment.  I am happy and full, and have a new determination to go home and sort out all my cookbooks and revisit old family favourites, leaving you with the best quote of the afternoon:

If someone makes your favourite pudding for you, you can be pretty sure they love you.