A glimpse of libraries past

As we move ever closer to the opening of Tūranga, it can be interesting to reflect and look back on how far libraries have come in the last few decades. Looking at our fabulous digital collections I hit a fascinating and poignant vein of images of Christchurch libraries past.

Particularly poignant is this image of staff in 1982 outside the new – now old – central library on the corner of Gloucester Street and Oxford Terrace. It feels very symbolic of change, and hope, and the unexpected – and was recreated in 2013.

Canterbury Public Library staff outside the new library building on the corner of Gloucester Street and Oxford Terrace [1982] File Reference CCL PhotoCD 11, IMG0091

Another image shows behind the scenes views of Canterbury Public Library from the 1950s. Lots of stamping and binding and indexing going on! I’m glad to say that our wonderful Bindery is still going strong, but I think we look a little different behind the scenes these days – still heaps of books, but much more technology.

A behind the scenes look at the day to day activities of the Canterbury Public Library 
[1954]
File Reference CCL PhotoCD 11, IMG0090

Two more views show cataloguing and processing in the 1960s and 1950s. We still do a considerable amount of cataloguing and getting items shelf ready, but we certainly don’t have tables like that any more, nor do we wear the legendary smocks!

The cataloguing and processing department of the Canterbury Public Library moved to the area that was formerly the bindery, who had moved to the ground floor of the library house next door in Cambridge Terrace 
[1967]
File Reference CCL PhotoCD 11, IMG0092

Cataloguing and processing staff of the Canterbury Public Library in their workroom in Cambridge Terrace 
[1953]
File Reference CCL PhotoCD 11, IMG0093

I love looking at photos like this. It’s great to look at where we have come from as we plan our move ahead into the future. However, as much as we have changed, some things do stay the same – piles of books and librarians working hard to connect you with wonderful content.

 

Library memories

Having been a librarian for longer than I care to remember, the card catalogue holds a place dear to my heart. I remember as a library assistant filing new cards — one for the author, the title and the subject entries. A tedious job, but vital for the smooth running of the library. You can imagine the dismay when someone broke into a community library I worked in and dumped the whole lot on the floor! It took days to put in order.

These cards represented the hand writing of various cataloguers through the years. The advent of typewriting skills and twink was the next exciting venture, to be followed by a large and cumbersome computer system that saw the end of those beautiful cards and the glorious cataloguing drawers that are so fashionable today.

The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures is a chance to revel in the glory days — photographs of huge rooms filled with librarians filing cards at the mammoth Library of Congress, hundreds of images of original cards, and early edition book covers accompanied by engaging text and stories of the stacks! Not just for librarians, this will appeal to anyone who enjoys artifacts and stories from time past.

 

The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English

This is a true story. This is two stories. It is a history of Timbuktu, a place with myth and legend wrapped around it, and it is the tale of librarians and archivists who worked hard to protect precious manuscripts from destruction.

The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu details the events of 2012 as Timbuktu (in Mali) comes under the control of jihadists linked to al-Qaeda. Rare manuscripts are under threat. The fear is that these cultural treasures will meet the same fate as historical sites destroyed by the fundamentalists. Archivists and librarians — and in particular Timbuktu librarian Abdel Kader Haidara — come together and formulate a plan to spirit away manuscripts. They smuggle them out via a network of helpers, concealing and transporting them away by land and sea.

The drama of 2012 alternates with chapters about history and the various explorers who sought after the city of Timbuktu. In 1788, Sir Joseph Banks (naturalist on the Endeavour with Captain Cook) was part of the African Association Committee considering the exploration of Africa. Timbuktu was a golden unknown, and yet this Committee and others had it pegged as a place of great wealth. It became an alluring target for European explorers.

These historical chapters tell us a lot about Timbuktu, and the adventures and horrors that faced various explorers who got there, or didn’t. They also unveil the fiction and myth-making at the heart of its histories, and how people chased after a place that didn’t really exist.

The story is as punchy, thrilling, and exciting as a thriller. But it doesn’t take the easy route and is not simply an adventurous yarn about heroic librarians. Charlie English has done a mass of reading, research, as well as interviews and first-hand reporting. Were there really hundreds of thousands of manuscripts? How bad was the risk from the jihadists? What happened to all the money donated by various international agencies? He scrapes away bluster and lily-gilding, working away at finding the truth, and he gets as close to it as he can. The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu is a brilliant piece of research, and a history with layers and depth.

The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save its Treasures
by Charlie English
Published by HarperCollins New Zealand
ISBN: 9780008126643

Read articles by Charlie English in The Guardian:

• Why the chroniclers of Timbuktu are the city’s most innovative writers
• ‘Jihadists were going to burn it all’: the amazing story of Timbuktu’s book smugglers

William Dalrymple’s review sums up the brilliance of this book: The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English review – how precious manuscripts were saved

More about the librarians of Timbuktu

 

The Beautiful Librarians

I get a little frisson of excitement when I am reading a novel and one of the characters turns out to have had superior career guidance and is a librarian. And September was my month of librarian-related reads. It all started with The Beautiful Librarians, a 2015 poetry collection by Sean O’Brien:

The beautiful librarians are dead,

The fairly recent graduates who sat

Like Francoise Hardy’s shampooed sisters

With cardigans across their shoulders

On quiet evenings at the issue desk,

Stamping books and never looking up

At where I stood in adoration.

Then I started to see patterns, and books with library characters jumped off the shelves at me. Like Teresa in Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel: This Must be the Place. Teresa meets a young man when she is helping tourniquet his nephew’s wound. He asks if she is a nurse and she replies:

“No, a librarian” she said, adding, “but we do a first-aid course as part of our training.”

Well, let’s just say that he was lucky he got her and not me. But he tracks her down, visiting all the libraries in Brooklyn. Although this really is Love At First Sight (good luck with that all you first-aidy library types), they absolutely do not live happily ever after.

And you might not identify with this particular librarian, but the choice of library characters is wide, and there will be one for you:

Take Loretta, who is a school librarian in Laurence Fearnley’s 2016 novel The Quiet Spectacular and who has embarked on compiling The Dangerous Book for Menopausal Women while waiting to collect her son from after-school activities. Hesitant in her dealings with semi-feral packs of teenagers in the school library, she forms a bond with one of them – Chance. No one falls in love with Loretta at first sight, but there is more to library life than that. There’s involvement in even one person’s life that helps to turn it around. Agree?

And not all the books I discovered are about lady librarians. The Book of Speculation has a young male librarian – Simon Watson. Simon is a loner who is about to lose his library job.  If the words “crumbling” “mysterious package” and “antiquarian bookseller” are a turn-on for you, then you will love this book. It also has a stunningly beautiful cover.

All these books are recent additions to the library collection. All are well worth reading.  All involve librarians. So all you librarians out there, remember these books as you hand out your gazillionth computer pass, download your umpteenth document and wrestle with the wonders of 3D printing yet again. Know that you still have allure, that your library mystique is still there. And that, at least in the minds-eye of these four authors, you remain A Beautiful Librarian!

• Find more fiction about librarians in our catalogue.

Poetry at Parklands: the Poet Within

2016 Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2016 hits New Zealand on Friday 26 August and the celebration unleashes the power of poetry all around our great nation with lots of events and poetry competitions.

Parklands Library draws on “the poet within”, within the Christchurch City Libraries that is. That’s right, many of our librarians are writers too. Instead of dispensing poetry books to customers, on Saturday 27 August 2016 at 2pm four of our librarian poets will be reading their own work.

The poets:

Damien Taylor is a street poet who loves to retell his experiences from deprived small town aspirations to broken big smoke dreams. He likes to call himself Tīhore and wishes he was more Māori than he actually is.

Rob Lees is a born and bred Cantabrian and Goddess of the Knowledge Mountain, according to her husband. She says that her poetry is a reflection of her life experiences and is a way of keeping the voices in her head out!!

dYLAN kEMP is an artist of some renown. Not heaps, but some. He has published 3 books of poetry, all available from Christchurch City Libraries. He also paints, drums, dances like a wild man, and tickles his children.

Andrew M. Bell has published two books of poetry, Green Gecko Dreaming and Clawed Rains, and one book of short stories Aotearoa Sunrise (all available from Christchurch City Libraries). His work has been published and broadcast in Aotearoa, Australia, England, Israel and USA.

Five minutes on a Thursday afternoon

Libraries have changed; everyone knows this. There are no shushing fingers, aisles of silence and stern librarians imparting knowledge (not sure there have ever been these, especially wearing spectacles down their noses and tweed skirts). The library is used by people from all areas of the community for so many different reasons.

Femdalton Library, Flickr CCL-2012-09-24IMG_7917

Libraries are true community spaces, and I decided to test this out by wandering around Fendalton Library on a Thursday afternoon at 2pm. Here is a list of what I found in 5 minutes… It reads a little like the twelve days of Christmas:

• 9 people playing board games
• 10 knitters knitting
• 4 browsing the recent returns
• 7 using the wifi on their laptops
• 5 people reading
• 6 in the non-fiction section
• someone skyping in Italian
• a mother reading to her child in our oversized chair
• 5 students studying
• a tutor teaching a young child maths
• a group practicing conversational English
• 4 people issuing books
• kids returning a mountain of picture books
• 2 people using the wifi on their phones
• 8 people on the public computers
• 1 on the photocopier
• a boy making origami
• 1 shelver shelving
• two trolleys being emptied
• two help desks being used
• and someone asking where the toilet is

Whew! All over this fair city, libraries are full, librarians are working hard and people are finding what they need, interacting with others, enjoying themselves and gaining and imparting knowledge. Not a bad place to work I guess.

Fantasy newsletter June 2014

Here are a selection of covers from our June 2014 fantasy newsletter. You can subscribe to our newsletters to receive them direct to your email address every month. As well as some new titles each fantasy newsletter has a theme – this month its librarians.

   

 

Back to the future – Librarians in 1982 and 2013

Canterbury Public Library staff outside the new library building on the corner of Gloucester Street and Oxford Terrace 1982

Christchurch City Libraries staff reenact the 1982 shot on their final visit to the Central Library on Gloucester Street. And a few of the same staff are present in both shots.

And a flashback to our smocky past.
1968.

2007.

See more photos from our farewell to Central Library on our Flickr.

We’d love you to share your Central Library memories too.

The scary librarian – not!

Where would you rank librarians on a scariness scale? Somewhere between teddy bears and hugging according to a Time magazine article,  Fearing Well (January 9, 2012). That is, not scary at all.

Turns out we are really bad at working out what is truly fearful, as David Ropeik explains in his book How risky is it, really? We prefer not to fear the real killers like obesity, global warming and heart disease, and  persist instead in the mistaken notion that asteroids, insects and cell phone radiation will get us in the end.

Personally, I am between a rock (not an asteroid, thank goodness) and a hard place when it comes to the risk of flying – apparently getting to the airport should be more feared than the flight itself – a case of losing on the roundabouts what you gain on the swings?

Still, we will be hard pressed to calm our customers (even if we are armed with teddy bears and hugging for all we are worth) should there be a lightning storm or a shark in the library. We are all, quite rightly, terrified of them and a little bit of fear can save lives:

Sometimes the only thing we have to fear is a lack of fear itself

So what gets your palms all sweaty? And don’t say earthquakes – they didn’t feature in this article at all.

The Librarian’s Holiday

These days  I’m a migrant, like many of my fellow librarians. I’ve spent the last year  working around the city’s libraries. Now I find myself in one of the smaller libraries, with  one of the best lunchroom views ever.

I had never set foot in the Lyttelton Library until I chose it as my place of work and refuge back in mid December when my own library, Fendalton, closed for repairs. It’s a curious shade of pink stucco, with cubes and portholes and quirkiness all part of it’s design. I can sit in the lunchroom and look at the hills, or across the port with all its busyness  to the other side of the harbour.

On sunny days, everything shines, the sea looks glorious and everyone is out on the main street – locals, visitors and sailors from all over the world. Even on gloomy and rain soaked days, the hills provide a place for the clouds to hang out, roll around on and generally look impressive.

I’m finding Lyttelton Library  is a wonderful example of a community library in the truest sense. In a small library you can really get to know your customers. In shaky times the library has remained a steadfast community refuge.

The way Lyttelton looks has changed forever. While I hear  many sad stories, community members are supporting one another, pulling together and looking to the future. The Farmer’s Market is thriving, as is Project Lyttelton, an initiative to build a strong community.

I’ve helped a Ukranian sailor Skype to his family half a world away, given daily information to tourists and dealt with an injured seagull that plopped down outside our door.

Relationships are encouraged with customers, stopping to pass the time of day to build those ties within a close knit community. This is something I’ll take back to my busy bustling library when my ‘summer holiday’ at Lyttelton comes to a close.

Every day I drive through the Lyttelton Tunnel to work. I have loved this tunnel since I was a small child. I emerge each morning to a whole new world, like going on holiday. The weather can be completely different, the seagulls are wheeling in the sky and it’s just lovely.