Duplicate or interesting?

[onelife]

Hi all,

I am due to start working our next website/portal and wanted run through a few things.

Hypothetically the idea is to cover say 50 locations each covering 50 services.

Now if on each page with the business listings was short article of 150 - 200 words on each service to give the visitor a little history or background knowledge of the service on page, would this be seen as duplicate content or useful content - bearing in mind that the article will be in all 50 locations.

If it is not duplicate would it have a positive affect on serps or would it dilute keywords too much.

Many thanks in advance