A highly accessible portal, organised with state of the art technology and equipped with excellent searching tools, provided an easy and attractive interface to access the repository. Through the OSR portal, users were 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 were 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 facilitated communication between users and museums by identifying common terminology and creating links. The easy access and the possibility of tagging objects enhanced 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 was encouraged through social tagging of the educational objects. This was one of OSR’s main innovative points, since it provided 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 proposed a Roadmap towards a standardized Science Resources (re-)usability. This tool included 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.

Project financed under the EContentplus programme. Grant Agreement ECP-2008-EDU-428045.