Education and society: The UK contributes over newly digitised museum objects to provide a boost for online learning

About 6,500 newly digitised objects from University College London and the University of Reading’s diverse museum collections are now openly accessible to students, teachers and the public at large, thanks to funding from JISC.

The objects include rare Ancient Egyptian artefacts brought to life in twenty-first-century 3D; digital images of zoological specimens in glass jars, strange and beautiful anatomical prints, sixteenth-century portraits, and intriguing nineteenth-century scientific gadgets. The digital artefacts encompass a range of disciplines from sciences to the arts.

In addition to the digitised objects, which can be freely viewed, downloaded and used on a Creative Commons licence, the two museums have also produced a range of Open Educational Resources (OER) such as videos and worksheets to support object-based learning. The interdisciplinary nature of these resources makes them particularly versatile for online learning and suitable for the growing number of initiatives such as Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

The digitised objects, which will add to a bank of 150,000 already existing digital resources from the two museums, are available through Culture Grid, the UK gateway to heritage resources. The OERs can be accessed through JORUM, the online educational resource sharing site.