About OERSI

OERSI, the Open Educational Resources Search Index, is a search engine for open educational resources in higher education, provided jointly by the University Library Center of North Rhine-Westphalia (hbz) and the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library since 2020.

OERSI offers a central search entry point for educational resources from distributed national and international providers with numerous filter options. OERSI does not host any resources itself, but collects their metadata and homogenizes them to enable a uniform search.

To enable other applications to access the data, OERSI offers an open API that allows the OER search to be integrated into other platforms. Examples of this are the integration into the Lower Saxony OER portal twillo and the North Rhine-Westphalian online portal for digitally supported learning, ORCA.nrw. In addition, OERSI also offers the prepared metadata for download in the form of regular dumps.

All planning and development is openly documented on the GitLab platform. The OERSI Kanban board provides a constantly updated overview of past, current and future tasks. Open and transparent processes offer various ways to participate, from simple feedback via the contact form to reporting bugs and requests for new features. Details can be found in the Guidelines for collaboration.