About OERSI

OERSI stands for Open Educational Resources Search Index - a search engine for free educational materials in higher education. As a central search entry point, OERSI connects OER repositories of distributed state initiatives, institutional repositories of universities and libraries, and subject-specialized repositories for OER.

OERSI has been developed since the beginning of 2020 as a jointly initiated project by the Hochschulbibliothekszentrum des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (hbz) and the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) as an open source-based service. In summer 2020, the service was launched for the first time as a public beta version and was transferred to productive operation in spring 2021.

No content is stored in OERSI itself, only the metadata is merged and homogenized for uniform searching. The OERSI data structure is developed cooperatively within the Allgemeines Metadatenprofil für Bildungsressourcen (AMB). Compared to repositories, it is not possible to upload materials in OERSI itself. Materials are made available through the connected sources.

Due to its open interfaces, OERSI itself can be integrated into other platforms to search for OER. The first 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. The integration of the OERSI search into one’s own website or portal can be configured in such a way that subsets of the OERSI can also be used. For example, a website can offer only certain types of material from the OERSI, while another website focuses on content in certain languages or displays only certain sources from the OERSI.

All development takes place openly on the GitLab platform. Open and transparent processes offer various ways to participate, from simple feedback via the contact form to reporting bugs and requests for new features in GitLab tickets to participating in development by submitting suggestions for improvements in the form of merge requests.