Bastille, a pop group or a French Fort? How the Research and Education Space (RES) is using linked o Members : #OER16

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Wed, Apr 20 2016, 10:30am – 11:30am

Authors: Richard Leeming

Room: Pentland (West)

Theme: Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education

Type: Presentation

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Description

Museums and galleries are a vital tool for education. Every schoolchild has, at one time, enjoyed a visit to one of the UK’s world-beating museums or galleries.

Digital technology is building on that. Thanks to the world wide web, any teacher, any student, should be able to access the digitised version of any cultural asset in the country at the click of a mouse.

That’s the theory, in practice, it’s not that easy. While significant progress has been made digitising cultural objects and good work has been done in creating metadata standards, data and assets largely remain silo’d in museum and gallery websites.

So while your children no longer need to leave their classroom to visit a museum or gallery, your browser still needs to visit each institution’s website separately.

We will demonstrate how The Research and Education Space is changing that by creating an efficient platform so that relevant educational content can be found in one place and delivered directly to students, teachers and lecturers.

The presentation will showcase one of several products that are ‘Powered by RES’[1].

RES is indexing Linked Open Data published by museums, galleries and other cultural heritage organisations and will create the definitive catalogue of UK cultural assets.[2]

There are several aspects to the design of RES that are crucial:

Whilst we require data to be openly licenced and the licence to be machine-readable, we make no stipulations about the licencing of assets other than the licence must also be machine readable.
We are not holding or publishing any digital assets, we are merely indexing data, all requests that are handled by RES will be sent back to the host institution.
We are not building any user interfaces, the project is so wide-ranging and so flexible that we are building RES as open source[3] and open access so anyone can build anything they like on top of it.

There are significant differences between our approach and that of other search engines. Provenance, authenticity, authority, licencing and permanence are all enhanced by RES, while we are less interested in the number of links to an object or what is contemporary.

RES is a partnership between the BBC, Jisc[4] and the BUFVC[5] and is actively seeking input from education professionals[6]. We will finish our presentation with a call to action for you to tell us what you need to help us guide the future of RES.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/corporate2/connectedstudio/events/res

[2] http://www.modes.org.uk/news/latest-posts/2015/09/28/the-future-of-online-–-discover-the-research-and-education-space/

[3] https://bbcarchdev.github.io/inside-acropolis

[4] https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/towards-the-research-education-space-res-07-jan-2013

[5] http://bufvc.ac.uk/projects-research/projectstimeline/res-bob

[6] https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ele/2015/05/28/res/

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