Reference

Facebook – Pukamata

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Kia ora. This post is a brief introduction to Facebook, and a look at ways of making it work for you.

What is Facebook?

Facebook is a social network that started in 2004. Facebook has a large audience, and allows you to connect with friends, relatives, groups, and local organisations. According to Facebook’s research, Kiwis use it primarily to stay connected with friends and family, while nearly 8 in 10 also make product and brand discoveries via Facebook. As at April 2015, over 2.5 million Kiwis active on Facebook every month.

Find out more key trends about Kiwis on Facebook.

Getting started on Facebook

Read the terms of use and privacy policy before you sign up. Create an account. Go to settings and adjust the privacy of your profile if you don’t want everyone to see your information.

Facebook

Using Facebook

Set up your network by searching for friends, relatives, events, and organisations you are interested in and “Liking” them. “Liking” other people’s pages and profiles means you might see their posts in your news feed.

Posting on Facebook

You can post a story by picking what type of story you want to share, and typing in any details you want to add. You can tag your friends or other organisations if you want them to be notified, and you can also tag people in photos you share.

Hashtags make topics and phrases into clickable links in your posts. This brings together posts on particular topics.

Find out how to post and share.

Facebook post

Posting photos and videos

You can share photos and videos on Facebook. A good way to do this is by making an album of images. Facebook automatically resizes and formats your photos when you add them to Facebook. To help make sure your photos appear in the highest possible quality, try these tips – Resize your photo to one of the following supported sizes: Regular photos (width in pixels): 720px, 960px, 2048px. Cover photos should be 851px by 315px.

News feed

Find out how the news feed works. It can sort by either Top Stories – worked out by Facebook metrics based on the number of comments and likes a post receives and what kind of story it is – or Most Recent.

FB news feed

The number of comments and likes a post receives and what kind of story it is (photo, video, status update) can make it more likely to appear in your News Feed. You can adjust your settings if you aren’t seeing the posts you want to.

Facebook groups

Facebook groups enable you to connect with groups like family, coworkers, or those who share a hobby or special interest. A Facebook group is a dedicated space where you can share updates, photos or documents and message other group members. You can also select one of three privacy options so the group can be private if you choose.

Find out more about Facebook groups.

Facebook events

Facebook events are a great way of building a community. If you make an event page, you can invite people to the event, and you can also share information on it.

Find out more about Creating and editing events.

For an example, see this Matariki event on Facebook.

Matariki1

Facebook pages

You can create a Facebook page for your group, organisation, or business. It gives you a space to share events and other information.

Find out how to create a page.

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights allows you to find out more about users of your Facebook page. What demographic are they in? When are they online? What posts do they find most engaging? Use the data to help you. For example, if your users are mostly online between 6pm and 9pm, you can schedule posts for this time for maximum reach.

Local pages

Here are some Christchurch Facebook pages that illustrate how an active presence and community can work well. They take a different approach and yet are all effective:

Useful Facebook resources

Cover of Facebook Marketing Cover of Intimacy and friendship on Facebook Cover of Facebook

Sampling our customers

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Central Library ManchesterLast week was Enquiry Sampling Week at Christchurch City Libraries. As librarians we count and categorise our customer interactions for one week. It comes round fairly regularly and provides statistical information for the library network. This got me thinking. What do tally marks really tell us about our interactions with customers?

I had two enquiries that show how diverse our interactions with customers can be. The first happened when a customer approached me holding a piece of paper with half an article printed on it.

Customer: I need a copy of this and I want the whole article.

Me: Can you tell me anything about the article?

Customer: I got it twenty years ago at the Central Library from a paper I think.

Hmmm … This would require my “super librarian” reference skills (aka detective work) so I dusted these off and got to work. The interaction involved many questions, clarifying, listening, searching the catalogue, asking for help, more questions, clarifying again, and finally ending with filling in an an online form to request an archive. I categorised this interaction as “Reference – more than 15 minutes” which did not seem to give the query the justice it deserved.

My second interaction happened at the self-returns kiosk, where customers return their own books. This was a new for the customer so I was talking her through the process.

Customer: This is easy, you’ll be soon out of a job.

Me (not feeling so super): Hmmm …

Luckily for me this particular query was just a tally mark!

 

 

A Tiki Tour of our Digital Library

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Tikitour

This Tiki Tour takes a trip around our online offerings.
Find information about our collections and services, and unique Canterbury content.

What you can find in the Digital Library

We have books in our physical libraries – but also audiobooks, CDs, DVDs, magazines, material in other languages, and more in our collections.

Online, our home page links you to:

Dip into The Source

Your library card and PIN give you access to online resources in The Source. Try:

Cover of The Press from Press Display

Press Display is a large digital newspaper library. Full-page replicas of current print editions, including editorial content, graphics and advertising. Up to ninety days back issues.

Freegal is a service that lets you legally download and keep music MP3s and music videos MP4s from the Sony Music catalogue. Download up to three songs per week or one music video and one song.

OverDrive is a free e-book and audiobook collection. Find out more about our e-books.

Make connections in your community

Uncover local content

Map of the colony of New Zealand from official documents. 1844
Map of the colony of New Zealand from official documents. 1844

We have a strong focus on Christchurch heritage. Have a look at the following resources:

Discover more digitised resources.

Photo of Bird's eye poster
Birds eye view poster from our 1980s Christchurch Rock Music poster collection.

Explore our services

Keep up–to–date

Play in the catalogue

Cover of I only want you love me
“The cover gives you a clue – this is lusciously colourful photography …It oozes with 80s-esque style and glamour.”

Search our catalogue to find books, images, music, magazines, DVDs and more. Use a catalogue app on your mobile.

You can make booklists, rate books, write reviews, and share your opinions on our social catalogue.

Connect with social media

Need more help?

For more help, contact our helpful librarians.

Navigating and conversating with The Atlas of New Librarianship

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CoverYou know how sometimes a book is just getting mentioned everywhere, and you think “Heck I better read this”? In library circles, The Atlas of New Librarianship by R. David Lankes is that book.

It’s a hefty tome. I look at the contents and see the words dialectic, entailment mesh and Enterprenuerium and get a tad nervous. Will I need to go and get a PhD to read it? Then I’m relieved when Lankes says in the preface:

This book is all about conversations. The Atlas is my latest contribution to that conversation, and it is really an invitation for you to join in.

Ok, so now I’m into the meat of the book. What is this “new librarianship” anyway? “Simply put, new librarianship recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created through conversation.”(p.2)

Who is involved in this conversation? Lankes makes the case for the word “members” – not users, patrons, or cust0mers. People can be “members of a community, a library, or a conversation (and often all three at the same time)”. (p.6)

The big mission statement of librarians is something to think on – and measure your progress against “The MISSION of LIBRARIANS is to IMPROVE SOCIETY through FACILITATING KNOWLEDGE CREATION in their COMMUNITIES”.

Some of the ideas that leapt out:

The librarian must know the community and its needs. (p. 24)

The enduring value of librarians on which everything flows is their credibility (p. 24)

… to be of service in building knowledge means to be part of a conversation. (p. 33)

Stop thinking in terms of resources. Stop thinking in terms of recorded knowledge. Stop thinking in terms of collections or artifacts, or traditions, or circulation! Think only of knowledge in the community. That is your collection! (p. 43)

This is a mere taster of the substantial feast of ideas to be found in the Atlas. Read it, and also:

Professional reading: Digitising the Dead Sea Scrolls

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The Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known surviving biblical and extra-biblical texts in the world, are slated to be scanned with high-resolution multispectral imaging equipment and shared online, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Google announced …

The high-tech imaging of the scrolls, to be conducted with Google’s research and development operation in Israel, was originally conceived as part of an IAA initiative to conserve the thousands of delicate papyrus and parchment fragments and monitor their conditions much more accurately and noninvasively.

According to the IAA, the technology will also help scholars rediscover writing and letters that have “vanished” over the years. And “since we’re going to have the best possible images,” said Pnina Shor, the IAA’s Dead Sea Scrolls project manager, “we said, ‘Why don’t we take all the images, add to them all the translations, the transcriptions, the commentary and put them online?'” …
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Sargia Harrison
Information & learning