Open Science Resources

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. 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.

Full list of project partners:

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, 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
Universcience, 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