Tai Tapu Library by Rosemary Spiewak. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. CCL-DW-59641. Exterior view of the Tai Tapu Library at 846 Old Tai Tapu Road, Tai Tapu. Share your memories of Tai Tapu Library. Register on Canterbury Stories. Do you have any photographs of Tai Tapu or Tai Tapu Library? If so, feel free to contribute to our collection. Explore local images and share your photos Visit the Discovery Wall and upload your images Explore Canterbury Stories View more Picturing Canterbury posts ..read more

Sometimes it is difficult to identify places or people in photographs which can be incredibly frustrating as context is important.  Can you please help us identify the location of this photograph?  We think it is located in Banks Peninsula or somewhere in the Canterbury Region. We would love to put a name to the place and, we need your assistance to do so! If you can identify this location, please register on Canterbury Stories and comment on the original photograph. Group picnic by Alexander Edward Wildey. No known copyright. CCL-DBPA-0150 This glass plate came to Canterbury Stories ..read more

Felsi and Nela out walking. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. CCL-DW-130701. Felsi (left) and Nela are friends as part of the IHC Volunteer Friendship programme and will brave any weather so they can go for a walk. Here they are enjoying a walk around the block in the southern suburbs of Christchurch. Share your memories of volunteering in Christchurch. Register on Canterbury Stories. Do you have any photographs of volunteering in Christchurch? If so, feel free to contribute to our collection. Explore local images and share your photos Visit the Discovery Wall and upload your images Explore Canterbury Stories ..read more

Charlotte Godley, 1877, from the book Letters from Early New Zealand (1950). Out of copyright. I've been doing quite a bit of research into early Christchurch in some recent blog posts, and each time Charlotte Godley's Letters from Early New Zealand (also available as part of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre) has proved to be a vital source and mine of fascinating information. She regularly wrote long epistles to her mother in Wales, detailing life in Christchurch and providing insight into the people who lived there. While she may not have been producing a scandal sheet for society to p ..read more

Have you watched a music performance in the library recently? Each year Christchurch City Libraries celebrate NZ Music Month with performances by local musicians. Particularly, some musical artists with overseas backgrounds and experiences introduce a variety of world music to us.  If you are interested in this category of music, join us to appreciate traditional Chinese erhu music performance in South Library at 4 pm on Thursday 16 May.  The erhu, also known as the Chinese violin, is a Chinese two-stringed bowed musical instrument. It is composed of a drumlike soundbox, a vertical p ..read more

The New Zealand book world is eagerly awaiting the outcome of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, to be held this Wednesday 15 May during the Auckland Writers Festival. These include the Mary and Peter Biggs Prize for Poetry, the Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction, and the General Non-Fiction Award. Below are the finalists for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction - all astoundingly good.  A Better Place Explosion after explosion and the ground shaking around them as the dive bombers intensified their attacks on the 22nd Battalion's positions near th ..read more

Christchurch City Libraries blog hosts a series of regular podcasts from the New Zealand specialist human rights radio show Speak up - Kōrerotia. This show is created by Sally Carlton. In January 2024, the recently appointed National/Act/NZ First government declared it would halt proceedings, started under Labour, to lower the voting age from 18 to 16. This declaration was made the same week as the release of the Independent Electoral Review, which included a recommendation to lower the voting age, and came only months after the Supreme Court ruled that the current voting age of 18 breached th ..read more

Techweek — Aotearoa New Zealand’s festival for tech that’s good for the world — is on from Monday 20 to Sunday 26 May.  Visit the Techweek website See what's on in Ōtautahi Christchurch Techweek at the library Events include: TechFest: Woven Cultures in Digitech – A Day for Tamariki, Wednesday 22 May, 10am to 3pm, Tūranga A full day of hands on tech, inspiration and experiences for school groups ages 8 to 11 years. Bookings essential. Delivered by Tagata Moana Trust and friends across the whole of Tūranga. To book please contact Nina on talanoa@tagatamoana.com Find out more ESports show ..read more

Lower Heathcote River rubbish. In copyright. CCC-ARC-23-022-5-Plate-3-26. Rubbish from a nearby service station dumped below the high water mark in the lower Heathcote River. September 1972. Photograph taken from “Resource management in the estuarine environment”, a thesis by Alisdair Hutchison, 1972.  Share your memories of the Ōpāwaho Heathcote River estuary in the 1970s. Register on Canterbury Stories. Do you have any photographs of the Ōpāwaho Heathcote River estuary in the 1970s? If so, feel free to contribute to our collection. Explore local images and share your photos Visit the ..read more

Some well-known people who have died recently Lynne Reid Banks, 1929-2024 British author of books for children and adults John Barth, 1930-2024 American writer best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction Eleanor Coppola, 1936-2024 American documentary film director, screenwriter, and artist Andrew Davis, 1944-2024 English conductor. He was longtime chief conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra Joe Flaherty, 1941-2024 American actor, writer, and comedian Peter Higgs, 1929-2024 British theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner V ..read more