Open Science Resources

Towards the development of a shared digital repository for formal and informal science education.

Open Science Resources (OSR) is a collaborative project co-funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme. The project started in June 2009 and will continue for 36 months.

The aim of the OSR project is to create a shared repository of scientific digital objects - currently dispersed in European science museums and science centres - to make them more widely and coherently available, searchable and usable in the context of formal and informal learning situations.

A highly accessible portal, organised with state of the art technology and equipped with excellent searching tools, will provide an easy and attractive interface to access the repository. Through the OSR portal, users will be able to view the finest digital collections in European science centres and museums, follow attractive educational pathways connecting the objects with well-defined semantic metadata and even enrich the contents provided with social tags of their own choice. 
 Educational Pathways will be developed for each of the project’s user groups (students, teachers, families, visitors in general) to guide the user along a storyline connecting different objects, which may be physically kept in different European museums.
 From a professional point of view, the project facilitates communication between users and museums by identifying common terminology and creating links. The easy access and the possibility of tagging objects will enhance user experience in connection with the museum and science centre, creating greater engagement in the visitors and giving the museum important information about them.

User engagement with the museums and science centers content is encouraged through social tagging of the educational objects. This is one of OSR’s main innovative points, since it provides a bridge between the education and collection staff in the museums by allowing the visitors to share their life experience. Tagging lets users assert their own connections and associations between objects and phenomena in ways that reflect personal perspectives and interests. Tagging further enables re-discovery of activities previously performed; users’ tags record salient characteristics of personal interest and support subsequent searches.

As a last step, the project will propose a Roadmap towards a standardized Science Resources (re-)usability approach. This tool will include recommendations and guidelines for the design of Science Education Learning Content and Activities, on the appropriate metadata methods needed for their description in respect to both their educational and their domain-related characteristics.

Consortium

The consortium running the project includes a balanced mix of science museums and science centres, pedagogues, educational technologists, metadata experts, user groups and standardization bodies.
Ecsite, the European network for science centres and museums, based in Belgium, is the project coordinator.

The following organisations form the consortium:

- Bundesministerium fur Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur, Austria
- MENON Network, Belgium
- Elinogermaniki Agogi, Greece
- University of Bayreuth, Germany
- Lambrakis Foundation, Greece
- Deutsches Museum, Germany
- Heureka, the Finnish science centre, Finland
- Eugenides Foundation, Greece
- National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo Da Vinci, Italy
- universciences , France
- Palace of Miracles, Hungary
- Pavilhao do Conhecimento - Ciencia Viva, Portugal
- INTRASOFT Intl., Luxembourg
- Linnaeus University, Sweden
- IKnowHow, Greece
- University of Jyväskylä, Finland
- Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, USA
- University of Central Florida, USA
- The Science Education Center at National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan, RoC

Open Science Resources public web page

Open Science Resources portal

Contact:

Ecsite project coordinator Jennifer Palumbo: jpalumbo@ecsite.eu