Brisbane City Hall is now open again, after three years of restoration work. The Museum of Brisbane has opened several new exhibitions on Level 3 of the building, and guided tours and rides to the top of the clock tower are once again possible.

City Hall was originally constructed between 1925 and 1930, at a cost of £1,000,000. The Fryer Library holds an album of photographs taken by Bertha Mobsby which beautifully charts the building's progress. We've compiled the photos into a short video, so you can literally watch the building grow:

Bertha Mobsby was the daughter of photographer Henry William Mobsby, and was one of Queensland's early female photographers and cinematographers. Her album is part of the Daphne Mayo Collection (UQFL119). Mayo was a sculptor who created many works art located around Brisbane, including the tympanum and concert hall frieze in Brisbane City Hall.

To consult any of the Fryer's research collections, simply contact fryer@library.uq.edu.au or visit the Fryer reading room on the fourth floor of the Duhig Tower (building 2), St Lucia Campus.

Three important lists have been released over the past week in the Australian Literary Awards season.

Ahead of the announcement of the first ever Stella Prize on April 16, the shortlist was announced last Monday. The burial, Questions of travel, The sunlit zone, Like a house on fire, Sea hearts and Mateship with birds are all in contention to win the inaugural prize. As mentioned earlier, the Stella is a brand new literary prize, aimed at raising the profile of Australian women's writing.

The shortlist for the ALS Gold Medal was also released last week. The medal was first awarded to Martin Boyd in 1928. The winner will be announced on 3 July at the ASAL annual conference. The shortlisted titles are:

• Darkness on the edge of town by Jessie Cole
• Questions of travel by Michelle de Kretser
• Montebello by Robert Drewe
• Lost voices by Christopher Koch
• The fine colour of rust by P. A. O'Reilly

This morning, the 2013 longlist for Australia's leading literary award, the Miles Franklin was announced.

Tom Keneally is nominated for The daughters of Mars and Drusilla Modjeska for The mountain, which she discussed during a Friends of Fryer event last year.

M L Stedman is listed for The light between oceans, which won two prizes, including the Book of the Year Award, at last night's Indie Awards .

Carrie Tiffany's Mateship with birds is cited in both the Stella Prize shortlist and the Miles Franklin longlist, and Questions of travel by Michelle de Kretser in included in all three lists.

You can view all ten longlist titles and learn more about the Miles Franklin Award (and Reading Challenge!) online.

The items in this collection aren't just united by their quirkiness; one of the authors, Jonathan Safran Foer, describes his work as "a book that remembers it has a body" -and that's just what these books are; each one experiments with the physical book-form in order to create a story that is narrated as much through the reader's interaction with the book itself as through the words on its pages.

While these works are fascinating, during my research I often found myself thinking, 'why?'. Why tell a story by cutting-up someone else's words, as in Foer's Tree of Codes? Why tell a story that can be shuffled and read in random order, like Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1?

It is tempting to just dismiss these texts as gimmicks or novelties. However, viewed as a collection, their purpose seems clear; together, these experimental works challenge our usual expectations of the written narrative, revealing just how ingrained and invisible the conventional book-form has become.

And, of course, each offers an innovative and often remarkable story that is intriguingly bound to the paper (or toilet paper) on which it is printed.

The collection includes 31 books spanning the 14th century to the present decade. Explore these unique works for yourself through the Fryer Library's new online exhibition, Unconventional Narration.

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Sarah Boothroyd is a writer with a weakness for quirky stories. She recently graduated from UQ with a Bachelor of Arts, and curated Unconventional Narration with the supervision and assistance of Dr Chris Tiffin at UQ.

Unconventional Narration, the latest Fryer Library online exhibition, is available to view online. It is best viewed with a Firefox, Chrome, or Safari Browser. (Previous online exhibitions are also available on our website.)

An almost capacity crowd attended the first Friends of Fryer event for 2013, "Antarctica: Bravery in the landscape" last week.

The panel discussion, hosted in conjunction with the UQ Art Museum, focused on the artwork of Linde Ivimey. In particular, her sculptures of ice warrior figures, which are a striking feature of the Art Museum's current exhibition "If Pain Persists… Linde Ivimey Sculpture".

Linde Ivimey shared her first hand experiences of visiting the Antarctic to take part in celebrations marking the 100th Anniversary of Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition. She also provided a valuable insight into her working life as an artist, describing how she draws inspiration from items as diverse as the remains of a family meal to Mawson's experiences.

Exhibition curator Louise Martin-Chew talked about her journey writing about Linde's work and inspirations in conjunction with creating the exhibition at the UQ Art Museum. Dr Sylvie Shaw, as chair of the discussion, also highlighted the continuing cultural influence of the Antarctic landscape and the mythology surrounding Mawson's expedition.

In addition, several Mawson-related items from the Fryer Library collection were on display. This included items from the papers of Alf Howard, a member of Douglas Mawson's 1929-1931 expedition to Antarctica.

The exhibition If Pain Persists: Linde Ivimey Sculpture curated by Louise Martin-Chew continues until 24 March. Find out more at www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au.

Fryer Library manager Laurie McNeice, curator Louise Martin-Chew, and artist Linde Ivimey.