People's network

From Digipedia

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OVERVIEW

The People's Network was a project begun in 1999 to provide an ICT learning infrastructure in all 4,300 UK public libraries. Primarily aimed at supporting lifelong learning policy and funded by the New Opportunities Fund (NOF, now Big Lottery Fund) the £120 Million project also provided ICT training for all 40,000 library staff to enable them to work comfortably with library users (who themselves might be beginners with computers and the Internet) and to use ICT to develop and manage content and services for their library.

A third element of the project was the creation of a webspace for public libraries, also called People's Network, which is subdivided into three services:

Enquire - a 24/7 enquiry service using email and chat technology
Read - a service for readers including a national database of reading groups in libraries
Discover - an online reference service including online subscription services and wider web resources

A separate NOF-digi workstream which ran from 1999-2004 was the £50 Million Digitisation of Learning Materials programme. This aimed to support learning in its widest sense by creating a corpus of digital content created by the digitisation of holdings in public sector organisations such as libraries, museums, archives and charities. Some 150 projects were funded involving over 600 organisations in the UK. Details of the extant projects show the range and geographic spread of the work.

People's network and lifelong learning

The existence of a nation-wide ICT infrastructure in the People's Network and the advent ufi/learndirect with its anytime online learning offer meant that shortly after implementation of the People's Network all public libraries became designated UK Online centres. These are places where people can find out more about how to get online and can use the library computers either prior to committing to a personal investment at home, where they can afford it, or as a new Library-based service to keep them in touch with ICT and learning. During its first full year of operation, Peoples Network made 44 million hours of internet connection available, ran 105, 600 ICT training sessions, helped 8,000 people find work and 87,000 people to engage in formal learning.