People who want to launch effective online movements must focus on building for the long-term, not on short-term viral phenomena, a global pioneer of online campaigning told a London meeting recently. Jeremy Heimans, co-founder of online petitions pioneer Avaaz (http://www.avaaz.org) was in the UK in November to launch Purpose Europe, the European arm of his campaign [...]

Digital 3-D “fabrication” printing studios; media spaces for teenagers; and tablet computer rental machines are just some examples of how public libraries in the US are creating new digital services, a leading library consultant told delegates at a meeting of the Online Computer Library Centre’s European council meeting for 2012. OCLC trustee Kathleen Imhoff said [...]

By Richard Hudson Few public sector organisations that have embraced the digital age are seriously considering their ‘brand experience’ when doing so. By introducing more ways for the stakeholder to communicate you are also increasing the number of ways that they judge their experience of interacting with you – that is your brand. The same consideration [...]

In today’s world of flexible and home working, the UK’s libraries have a unique opportunity to play a central role in many people’s lives by creating public spaces for people to meet and access new technologies, delegates heard at this month’s ‘Edge 2011’ digital libraries conference in Edinburgh. “You still see people queuing up at railway [...]

Live testing has begun on a new online platform – the Knowledge Hub, or KHub ( http://www.local.gov.uk/knowledgehub ) – designed to improve social media-based information-sharing between public sector workers. The new service will be managed by the Local Government Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA), with support from the Department of Communities and Local Government. It builds [...]

More than two thirds of UK local authorities now have at least one Twitter account (314 councils – 73%) and a similar number have a Facebook account (267 – 67%), according to a report due to be published next week by the Society of IT Management (Socitm). The society’s annual ‘Better Connected’ snapshot review of all [...]

Online gaming techniques are being used by a project in Finland to collate and digitise huge volumes of historical documents from the country’s national archives. Launched by the National Library of Finland, the first phase of the project, named ‘Digitalkoot’ – which means ‘digital volunteers’ – involves getting members of the public to manually correct mistakes [...]

It seems that no self-respecting council or public sector body is now without their Facebook page or Twitter feed. But are they really worth the effort? And if you are one of the ones who has yet to take the plunge, what are the secrets to success? We talked to Edinburgh City Council Libraries [...]