An XML Language Template Design for Managing a Remote Instrument Educational Outreach Project

Abstract

For the past two years we have been operating a remote instrument educational project called Bugscope. Bugscope is an educational outreach project that provides access to an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) for K-12 classrooms. While the operational aspects of the project require a minimal amount of staff time, the information management for the project is difficult for a small microscopy research group to support without a significant allocation of resources away from the group’s principal research goals. in an effort to alleviate this problem we have begun, in the past five months, to develop a software toolkit called ‘Information Technology for Outreach Projects’ (ITOP) - using the Bugscope project as a test bed. The goal of ITOP is to make it practical for academic research groups to provide scientific resources for educational outreach projects by automating many of the administrative and data handling tasks.