Project title
Description of initiative
The City of Turku’s MyLibrary Project started with a project in Spring 2018 that found ways to bring culture and leisure services home to those who had difficulty in getting out to those services because of their advanced age, illness or disability. The principal target group were older people living at home and in nursing homes. The outcome of this project was a service offered by the Recreation Division in the City of Turku that allows residents to enjoy culture even when access to services is difficult. The service is free of charge for maximum accessibility. The digital services of the Recreation Division have been brought together on an accessible website (omakirjasto.fi). Some third-party services of high quality and free of charge are also included. The aim was to make the website as clear, easy to use and attractive as possible. MyLibrary provides access to
the selected services even for clients who have no previous experience of Internet use. The service can also accommodate a client’s possibly diminished ability to use the service due to a memory disorder or decline in motor functions, etc. Navigating the site has been made as easy as possible. Many clients have a hard time finding interesting and high-quality content online, so the selection in this service is deliberately limited on the principle of ‘less is more’. Having a clearly defined selection also makes it easy for staff in nursing homes to find digital cultural content. The website allows access for instance to audio books, e-books, concerts of the Turku Philharmonic, photograph collections of the Turku Museum Centre and exercise activities.
Further information on the initiative
Themes: Culture and...
Keywords
Target group
Cultural field
Timeframe
Results, benefits, impact and lessons learnt
Clients themselves were included in the design of the service from the start. The organizers acquired tablets at the start of the project, and students in social welfare and health care were recruited to help trial clients explore various digital services. Through this, they gained information on what services clients were interested in and how competent they were in using them. They also gained information on the sort of devices that clients were likely to have and what instructions and support they would need.
These experiences gave them benchmarks for service development: they eliminated services that were too complex to use, improved their instructions and designed support functions. They also noticed that not all older people have the capability to use digital services even if they have the motivation to do so. On the other hand, they discovered that motivation depends crucially on having a genuine interest in the content of the services available, because interest will inspire clients to learn new things. Paying bills or managing a pension online are not particularly inspiring reasons for learning digital skills, but pleasant and interesting online content helps lower the threshold for using the Internet for other things as well.