Whether you use digital resources in your work with schools and other publics or have only thought about it until now, here is your chance to help us create a very useful tool for science centres and museums that everyone can contribute to and is free to use.

Let us know what you are looking for in an educational portal, how you like to browse through resources and the use you make of them:

Click here to access the questionnaire

It will take just a few minutes to fill in.

The results of the questionnaire will be used to improve the portal created within Open Science Resources (OSR), a collaborative project led by Ecsite and 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.

More about the project on www.openscienceresources.eu

For information write to Jennifer Palumbo: jpalumbo@ecsite.eu