Connecting the past to inspire a future of learning

Richard Leeming introduces a new project which organises and indexes Linked Open Data from public institutions and makes it available to students, academics and teachers. An excellent video primer is available on the Research and Education Space website. 

Last week, the BBC, together with its partners from Jisc and the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC), spent three days at the BETT Show to meet with education and technology companies and tell them about the Research and Education Space (RES).

RES is an ambitious new project which is aiming to make it easier for teachers, students and academics to discover, access and use the wealth of material held in the public collections of the great cultural institutions, such as broadcasters, museums, libraries, galleries or publishers.

As things turned out, it seems it isn’t just us who are enthused by the possibilities offered by RES.

It’s obvious that in a partnership you need agreement or buy-in from other people if it’s going to succeed. The Research and Education Space is a partnership that depends on persuading quite disparate institutions to work together, from cultural institutions to private companies in the educational market. So an opportunity to meet with the many companies that exhibit at the BETT Show who are developing digital educational products and introduce them to RES, was too good to miss.

A bad outcome would have been a series of blank faces, a lack of understanding, some polite handshakes at the end of each meeting and our follow-up emails going unreturned.

That hasn’t happened. What we got instead was more enthusiasm than we could possibly have hoped for. We met a variety of companies, from those building VLEs to those creating content aligned to curricula. I can’t reveal who said what, but the phrase that was most often used to describe RES was: “This is really exciting”. Just as welcome was feedback from the Product Manager who said integrating RES with their existing product is “not an enormous amount of work”. Another said: “I don’t want my clients going outside the product to find teaching materials”. Everyone realised the potential of RES to deliver relevant, trusted, authentic content direct to teachers and learners where they need it most.

One of the longest and most eye-opening conversations we had, which we hadn’t anticipated, was how RES can support the government’s School Internet Safety agenda. As RES is built on open data and publishes open APIs which maintain provenance, it's easy to ensure that when it's integrated into a third party platform, such as a VLE, it only returns data published by the world’s leading institutions is used, allowing a level of trust by default.

So over the next few months we expect to see several companies building RES into their educational products and we’re expecting that this will begin to enhance education in schools, colleges and universities right across the UK.

It’s a core part of the BBC’s remit to 'inform, educate and entertain’. RES is playing a key part in supporting the second of the BBC’s public purposes: promoting education and learning

But last week’s success is also a call to action for the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums sector.

The education sector is crying out for your content. People we met didn’t walk into the room just because they were meeting the BBC. They came because we and our partners are leading a cross-sector initiative and we’re indexing data from the UK’s leading cultural institutions - The British Museum, British Library, The National Archives, Europeana and Wellcome Trust, as well as the BBC, to name just a few.

If you are interested in getting your catalogues published as Linked Open Data as soon as possible, please get in touch via email at: [email protected].

• Discover more about RES on the Research and Education Space website.
• Follow @RES_Project on Twitter