OERSI

What OERSI is

OERSI is a search engine for open educational resources in higher education, jointly provided by hbz and TIB since 2020. It gathers and standardizes metadata from distributed national and international providers, then presents a central search with filters. OERSI does not host learning materials; users find records that point to resources held by providers. Included resources must relate to higher-education teaching or learning, be web-accessible, have at least partial open licensing, and include acceptable basic metadata. Developers can query the catalog through a JSON-based Elasticsearch API and use point-in-time searches for bulk access. Search requests should target the oer_data index because the generic endpoint can return results from multiple indexes and create duplicates. Metadata downloads are also available. Providers can submit metadata through schema.org and sitemaps, JSON over HTTP, OAI-PMH XML, structured HTML, or metadata dumps such as JSON and CSV. OERSI code is MIT-licensed, with reusable software called SIDRE. Integrations named by the project include twillo, ORCA.nrw, BASE, finc, and library search interfaces. A fifth-anniversary report said it indexed over 90,000 resources from 45 collections.