UK Public Libraries and Social Networking Services Available to Purchase

The purpose of this paper is to describe how public libraries can gain social networking services for the first time with DS Arena.

The paper provides a description of DS Arena and outlines its potential uses.

DS Arena is built on modern foundations which is critical in service delivery in the rapidly evolving Web 2.0 landscape. It uses a framework of web services to provide content and interactive services; these web services can be extended and revised in an incremental manner over time.

DS Arena provides a real opportunity for library and information services to deliver services and thereby redefine and extend their service offering to the citizen.