No it’s not a still from The Great Gatsby – this happy crew are the Edinburgh librarians of 1936, all glammed up for their Christmas dance. At least we don’t think this was their normal working attire…
See more from the library archives as well as pictures from our exhibitions, author visits and events on the shiny new Flickr site.

Our Town Stories  tells the story of Edinburgh through maps, images and narrative, using material from the collections of Edinburgh Libraries.
One of our favourite features of the site are the unique “then and now” images like this one of North Bridge. Click the image then move the slider to see how (much? little?) the area has changed since 1901.
Other ‘then and now’ images include:

Edinburgh’s Social Media Surgeries are back!
Would you like some help and advice on social media and the web? Come along to McDonald Road Library next Monday evening (21st January) any time between 5.30 and 7.30pm and get the heads up from the experts.

(With apologies to anyone who doesn’t speak Facebook – in which case you can probably stop reading now…)
If you ‘like’ us on Facebook you may have noticed fewer of our posts showing up on your newsfeed. This is due to some tinkering Facebook have been doing with the algorithm that decides which items are displayed.
To make sure you don’t miss out make sure you add us to your interests. You can do this by clicking on the gear symbol as shown below:

A top-notch lineup of local and family history professionals are joining us for Central Library’s Local and Family History Day on Saturday 17th November.

Fancy yourself as a photographer? Edinburgh Outdoors are running a competition to show what Edinburgh’s parks have to offer.
To get your creative juices flowing here are a few of our favourite images of parks and gardens from Capital Collections, our online picture gallery - how many do you recognise?
 

Did you know you can follow what’s going on in your local library on facebook? Nearly all our community libraries have active facebook pages where you can see which titles book groups are reading, get introduced to new members of staff, view videos and pictures from events, find out about recent additions to the book stock and all manner of other things besides.
You’ll find a link to facebook on your local library’s web page.

Here’s something fun to do in the run-up to Halloween; why not have some fun with the online version of the OED?  That might sound like a strange thing to do, but you know us, we’re all about fun and learning…

Edinburgh City Council is taking place in an event over on twitter, alongside other councils, called What We Do.  Council workers from a variety of departments will be tweeting all day today until lunchtime tomorrow, telling you all about what they get up to at work.  So hop on over to twitter and check out #whatwedo!

Whichbook is an exciting online toy tool to help you find new books to read.  You can browse and create your own lists of books by genre or theme, but the revolutionary thing about the site is that it allows you to fine-tune various sliders in order to tailor the search to exactly what you feel like reading at the time.