 Hi everyone, I'm Steele Agstaf. Welcome to the June monthly Pressbooks product update. This month I want to kind of show you some of the work that we've done over the last month and give you a preview for what's coming up. The first things I want to show you are some changes that we have made that we think are pretty exciting that impact the what we call the API. Some of this will be a little bit technical and kind of for for developers or programmers, but I will try to explain why these changes matter and how they do impact things that all of us rely on like the cloning routine or like the directory. So the first thing I want to share is that in Pressbooks we have what's called an API or an API for books in particular. The idea of an API is it's an application programming interface and it's a way that internet applications can exchange information with other internet applications or with clients that use that application. And so one of its functions is to make programming tools interoperable with other programming tools and we think this is part of our general commitment to not just supporting open publishing but using open standards ourselves and supporting technical openness all the way through the stack. We have an API for books and we expose a whole bunch of information about the public books that are published on our network that's available for anyone to read, consume and interact with. Our API supports a bunch of operations like creating, reading, updating and destroying but usually the public API is usually used for reading and we have a bunch of things that we've built that make use of this API. One of the things that we added was we added a whole bunch of new parameters and filtering capabilities to our books API endpoint. We use the API when we update the directory. So we're calling the API at every one of your Pressbooks networks and lots of other Pressbooks networks to ask for metadata information about the books published on your network so that we can collect it and display it accurately. We do that for your network catalog, we do that every time we clone a book but we also do it for the directory. And so we made a bunch of improvements so that the directory Fetcher tool that we use can be faster and more efficient and also these are API calls that any one of you or anyone else that's developing against Pressbooks can use. So we added some filtering capabilities so that you could filter your book list by license code to include or exclude any specific license or copyright license that you want. So for example, you could call the API. So here's what the book's endpoint looks like without any modifiers. You can see that I'm getting them. The first book on this network is the URL and then here's just a bunch of metadata, the title of the book, the ISBN, the keywords, the language, the copyright year. Anyone who visits this endpoint, this public endpoint can get a whole bunch of metadata about this book and then about this book and then about this book and so forth and so on. Well, now what you can do is you can add a kind of parameter to the end and this parameter is saying I want any of the books that do not have the CCBY license and do not have the public domain license. So now you'll see when I run this endpoint instead of the first results being this book, which actually does have a, let me show you the license somewhere down here. I'll find the license. This book has the CCBY license. Now the endpoint is not showing me that book because I've excluded it with this parameter. So the parameters that we've added, we have a license code parameter. We've added a title parameter, an in directory parameter. So you could see whether or not the books are listed for inclusion in the directory or no and a word count parameter. We use all of these for our fetcher and for the directory itself and you can use these or developers who are developing it. Pressbooks can now use these. So that's the first set of changes that we made and our directory is now using these filters to get faster and more performant and hopefully you'll notice that the directory is updated quickly with accurate information. I want to pause there. I know that was a little bit of a technical feature or a technical thing. Any questions that people have about the changes we made to the API and what impact it might have for you or your users? Okay, yeah. Simon commented, he's been hearing a lot about APIs lately with everything going on at Reddit. Yeah, the free access to open APIs has been a big point of concern for a lot of these big tech companies. Twitter and Reddit have both had big battles in the last couple of months about whether their APIs will be free and available for others. Our person at Pressbooks says, yes, our API is free and available and we want it to remain so. We're not charging people for access to the API. We think that's a public good that we should provide with public metadata about public books. So that's our position. Okay, so that's what I wanted to share about APIs and filtering. The next thing that I wanted to show is we made a handful of changes to the network manager dashboard. So I'm going to share my screen and show you if you're a network manager on a hosted Pressbooks network, you'll see something that looks like this and you'll notice that you have a welcome message and now there's a link now that will take you to, you can quickly view your network home page and clicking that link will then just show you what the home page of your network looks like. That is kind of an expected feature since if you go to a book dashboard, the book dashboard has a very comparable structure where you visit the book dashboard and you have a link that lets you visit the book. We now at the network level have a link that lets you visit the home page of your network. This feature has been there before, but one thing that we're adding is we want to focus particularly on the new network manager onboarding experience. We know from talking with lots of you that becoming a network manager is sometimes adopting in a new experience and it can be hard to know. We give you an onboarding packet that includes a network manager guide and another user guide and you're thinking, oh, there's 40, 50 things I need to focus on. Well, what should I do first? How do I know that I'm ready? What choices should I make or how should I make them? Our big focus has been on saying, let's try to simplify that experience and make it easier and faster for you to get to a place where you feel like your network is ready to launch, meaning you know the configurations and settings you want to have in place and you're ready to start inviting people at your institution to create and publish books. The faster we can get you there, the happier we think you'll be and the sooner you'll be able to actually get press books into the hands of the people who want to use it. So to that end, we've developed what we call a ready to launch checklist for new network managers. This will look slightly different if you're on an open source network versus if you're hosting with us because there's a few things that we do for our clients that obviously open source users may or may not want, but in general it's going to look like this. If your network is under say six months old and it's hosted by us, we'll display this ready to launch checklist. The first thing it will display for you is an option that says you want to brand your network and it tells you what to do here. And then if you were to click this link, it would take you directly to the page where you can do the branding of your network. So that's here where you can add your logo site title tagline. You can adjust your colors, etc. Let's say I've already done that in this case. Then I can say, okay, great, I did that. I'm ready to check that off my checklist. The next thing they want me to do is, oh, customize your homepage. So let's click that link. I'll open it in any tab to make it a little easier. And then here's my homepage. I can click edit here, customize the text or the the messaging here that I have on my homepage. Let's say I've done that and I'm finished with that. I then say, okay, great, check that one off. The next thing I want to do is adjust the default settings for new books and user permissions. So if you open this in a new tab, you can see here my default book theme. I may want to change this to Donham and I may want to make the default page size of exports on my network a larger page size, for example. These are just a couple of the many different settings and options that are available to you. You can see there's network defaults. There's also registration and user defaults here that you can customize and modify. But let's say I've changed those and I made them just the way that I wanted to. I could then say, okay, great, I did that. The next thing on my checklist, if you're using single sign on, it will ask you to go ahead and configure single sign on. In this case, I have the SAML SSO plugin active. So I'll click this link. And it will take me to the SAML configuration page. And this is where you and your identity provider on campus exchange the needed information to configure SAML. So I've already populated this, this is ready to go. And so I'll say, great, that's done. It's ready. These last two options are for our clients only, but we have a community forum and a private group for network managers. So clicking on this link will take you to an invitation page where you get an invitation to join this private group. And then I'll just show you on the end what it would look like. You'll see this really nice forum. And here's this group for pressbooks clients. And you can see that there's quite a lot of conversations in here between and among network managers and pressbook support staff. So if you want to ask questions of peers like, hey, how are you doing this at your campus? How are you advertising pressbooks? Or what kind of training sessions are you offering around the use of H5P? I heard that earlier in the, this would be a great place to have that conversation with peers and or pressbook staff. So let's say I've done that in the forum. The last thing that we do is for our clients, we say, great, you've done all these things. Book a short meeting with your customer success representative. We'll be Amy or maybe Mitch or someone at pressbooks. We'd love to take a 15, 30 minute meeting and just talk with you about how you feel. Are you ready to launch your network? Any other questions you have or things that were confusing or hard for you? So this would take you to a link that allows you to book time with our pressbook staff. I'm not going to show that on the recording because they probably don't want me to send everybody in the world on the YouTube to go to that link, but let's say that I've done that. Once I've done that, you'll say, okay, I've done through my checklist and we get this congratulations message. You're ready to launch your network. You can start inviting people to do your books. And we will be conducting a brief user experience survey so that we can understand what went well for you and what can be improved about that onboarding new network manager flow. If you said, oh, I accidentally completed that survey too early, you can always click the return to checklist and uncheck something until it's actually done. But that's something that's coming. It's going to be built into the network manager interface with the real emphasis on helping network managers, new network managers especially, feel confident and ready to share the power of pressbooks with users on your campus. So that's coming pretty soon. I wanted to pause there and take any questions about that feature or things that you might want to ask or see with that. I believe we mentioned this last month, but I just wanted to remind people I mentioned earlier the pressbooks directory and how the API feeds into the directory. But here, if you haven't been recently, this is the pressbooks directory. It includes around almost 5500 open access books. And we are using this Fetcher tool and the pressbooks API for 153 different pressbooks networks every hour. We check in with those networks and we update the metadata. Those filters and queries that we've built in the API allow us to do this faster and better. And down here you'll see here's all of the results and how to use them. We made a handful of changes recently that improve the overall performance and the speed and the accessibility of the directory. I can't show you all of them efficiently, but what I want to show is that one of the big changes we made was just an overhaul of this book card. The book card looks a lot more like it does on the network catalog now. You'll notice that we moved the cover images over to the left side of the book card. We kind of cleaned up and compressed the information that's being displayed here. So this is the license. This is how many H5P activities. Here's the word count. We removed the storage size because people told us that wasn't something they actually cared about and it was too much clutter. And we improved the display of information about the details about the book. So if there's bold or italics, it'll now be displayed. If there's links here, it'll be displayed. If it's very long, there's a read more button that lets you read more. And I just want to show very quickly that this is meant to kind of degrade gracefully as you move into a responsive design. At this point here, the site's going to refresh and resize automatically, and then you'll see this is built for mobile display and mobile view where the cover's here at top and the information is displayed, we think, in a clean way. You'll also notice on the mobile view now, we no longer display the curated featured collections. Those got really big and they were taking up so much space that people were getting lost and not able to find the search on mobile. So we removed that so that there's a better experience for mobile users. But the curated collections are still, of course, available on the desktop view. Those were the big things I think I wanted to focus on there. Behind the scenes, we did a full accessibility audit of this site and found a couple of things that we could do to improve accessibility and performance. So we're now including default alt tags for every one of these cover images. We're reading that and displaying that naturally. Before they were just treated as decorative images, but we think it's better to say title of the book cover for users of assistive technology. And we also restructured each part of this site. We use what are called ARIA labels to clearly describe and define each region of the page for users of assistive technology. And we made sure that the headings were used in a more consistent and logical manner so that if you're flowing with the screen reader, you're more able to navigate this page. So those were some changes we made under the hood to make this site more accessible and more performant no matter what kind of device or what kind of technology you're using to access this site. I think that's important to be included everyone. So those are some things that we did with the directory. The next thing that I wanted to share is a little bit smaller, but it's still kind of helpful for those of you who have been using the book editor. There was a change that we made at user request, actually, to help with the visual editor when you're using a certain kind of text box. So here I'm going to come into a chapter. Here's my, when you're using the visual editor in press books, you can add a bunch of pre-built components. Like for example, oh, okay, I've got more. I've got an exercises text box here. These text boxes come from this drop down menu. When you make an examples text box, you can see it's populated here. I type my examples here. I can make a third example. I can even turn the list off and make a new paragraph. It just, it works really nicely in the visual editor. However, when people were inserting the previous shaded text box, and they started typing before, when you enter to make, when people were pressing enter before, they were expecting it would be a new paragraph inside the text box, but press books was jumping you out of the text box. And down here, you weren't able to make multi paragraph text boxes without going into the text editor. We realized that was because it was complicated, but it was because WordPress has this feature called auto P, and we weren't wrapping these in paragraphs by default. So we've changed the markup now so that when you're in a text box and you click enter, it will stay inside the text box until you want to leave. And then you can click out. So if you're using both the text box or the standard text box, and you're typing within it and tap enter, it'll now just wrap it in a new paragraph. So that's a minor change, but hopefully it will be appreciated by those users who are frustrated by having to switch back and forth between the visual and the text editor when you're in a text box. Okay, next, I wanted to show, we also made some changes to the network catalog, some minor improvements here. If you haven't yet begun using this feature, we hope that you do and you consider it, but every network now comes with the ability to display an improved network catalog. It's kind of like a miniature directory for your network. And you can see you have all the faceting filtering options, you have all the search options, and you can customize the text to describe more about your what you publish and the kinds of books in your catalog. Well, there was two issues that we were having before. One was in the institution list or other lists, there were occasionally institutions or characters that had an apostrophe in their title. And when you were applying filters, the filtering tool would break because basically the parameter reader that we were using wasn't recognizing the apostrophe, it was breaking the query. So we fixed the query and the routing URL. So now when you filter or facet filter with values that have apostrophes, everything works as expected. And you can see that it's been filtered successfully. So that was one bug we fixed. Another bug is we now have given people the ability to set the catalog as their network homepage. So for example, Oregon State, when you visit their homepage, instead of displaying the landing page, they choose just to display their catalog as their network homepage. But we had a problem before because when you had set the home page, the catalog is the home page, we weren't allowing people to search as expected. So if I were to type the search query, you will now see that searching and filtering works like it does normally, even when you set the catalog to the home page, there was a little conflict that was preventing that from working as expected. We fixed that bug. And now if you set the catalog to your home page, you can use all of the faceting search filters as expected. So those are a couple of fixes and changes we made to the network catalog to make it work a bit more smoothly for some of the edge cases we saw. Amy, do you need to do something special to turn on the new catalog? No, I don't think you do. In fact, let me double check and make sure that Open Oregon is using it. But this was one of those things we wanted to make a catalog that gives you your book covers. That was a long time wish list item for Open Oregon. And I'm sorry if we didn't circle back with you, but let me take a look. In fact, Amy, do you mind if I share your network on the live demo? Sure. Okay, great. This is one of my favorite press books networks. I'm going to say look at this beautiful landing page. Here, your home page is actually displaying a little teaser preview of your new catalog. Looks good. Let's view your complete catalog. Here is Open Oregon's catalog coming up as soon as I click the link. Okay. There you go. You're using it and you have 95 gorgeous, beautiful looking books. Wow, that cover especially. Teaching my difference of power. I want to read it just from the cover. Gorgeous. Okay. So yeah, you're using it and it's already in place. So good job. Network manager, whoever is taking care of things where you're there at Amy. Hey, Steel. Yes, please. This is related to that kind of a follow up. And it was hard to tell from the screenshots there if the Oregon network was impacted. But we previously discussed the press book directory having low res version of the covers. Yeah. A few weeks ago, I noticed that even though that was fixed on the directory network catalogs, at least our network catalog and others I had looked at were still showing low res covers using whatever the old query was to pull an image file. Thanks for mentioning that. Okay. So I looked at a few others and they all seem to be impacted. But yeah, those Oregon ones look nice on my screen anyway. Okay. So you're saying the directory is looking good, but not your network catalog. Is that a good? Yeah, the network catalog is still showing just, you know, those slightly pixelated off covers. Yeah, that probably has to do with the default resolution size we set for that. That should be a pretty quick fix. I wasn't aware of that. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. Yeah, I'm guessing it's the same fix that was deployed to the directory and just okay, impacting some, maybe all works. Thanks for bringing that up, Michael or Mike. That's for Squares. Okay. Anybody else have questions or things they wanted to bring up about the catalog or any of the other things you've seen or heard so far? Okay. The last thing I want to mention, I'm just, I'm not going to show anything or mention this, but I will mention it in case it's of interest or importance for people. So we have an open source single sign-on plugin that uses the SAML 2 protocol. This is like a pretty commonly used authentication and authorization protocol in higher education. Up until very recently, we required all of the default setting was when you send us claims and assertions, we require that you sign them and that you encrypt them. The encryption step was extra security, but it wasn't strictly necessary and us requiring it rather than recommending or accepting it was really tripping up a lot of users, especially those who are new to configuring identity claim to management. So what happens is when you send a SAML claim, it's always going to be sent over SSL or secure layers. So it's very hard to intercept and steal and it will usually include, from press book side, we include, we require you to include a unique identifier and an email address. Neither of those are particularly sensitive pieces of information. The email address is generally director information and you don't strictly have to send it if you don't want it. Sending those claims with a signature across an encrypted connection, SSL connection, is definitely sufficient security for nearly every case and every instance and every case that we support. And so what we did was we changed our default setting for the SAML thing so that we no longer require claims to be encrypted. But mainly, if you've already set up SAML, it's not going to affect you at all. But if you're setting it for the first time and your IDP people were really struggling because they didn't know how to encrypt claims, well, we hope that this will save them time because they don't have to encrypt a claim if they don't want to. So this is probably just going to affect people who are setting up SAML for the first time in the future. And maybe our customer success or people like Mitch, it will save them a bunch of emails back and forth and network managers will probably save you a bunch of headaches because if you're a press book network manager, you're probably not also the identity provider management person at your campus. And coordinating that can be kind of messy. So we hope that that's a change that will make things smoother and faster. Does anyone have any questions about SAML or identity management or security claims? All right, awesome. So that's what I wanted to share and show in terms of things that we've delivered and shipped. I want to next talk about what's coming soon. And I also want to open up the conversation a little bit to your needs and interests and desires. So the first thing that's coming soon is that ready to launch checklist that I downloaded and showed. That's really close. We think that will be ready to ship in early July and that will be available on all of our hosted networks, particularly for new networks and new network managers. You'll also get some emails from our customer success team and people that are helping you to get ready to launch if you're in that boat or in that kind of age of networks. The second thing that we're working on that's really important for us is we have heard from the people who participated in the early pilots of the results for LMS product. So results for LMS is the tool that you can connect your press books books and your learning activities to your learning management system and send grades back and forth. Almost all of the pilot participants said, hey, we love this. This is great. It helps us understand activity completion, but we really want more insight into what students are learning. I want to see more than just the aggregate grade. And so we're trying to do research with past current perspective potential users of this product to understand what is it that you most want to know about learning? What kind of visualizations or what kind of questions or insights do you as an instructor want to have with a press books and H5P activity? And we want to know similar kinds of questions from the students or the learners themselves. So what we really are trying to do is over the next month or two recruit as many prospective users, ideally faculty users to tell us what they most want to know and learn. So we're designing a survey and we'd really like your help identifying people, either it's you or maybe faculty or potential users on your campus to help give us real insight into what they would most want to see, what would be most valuable to them. The topic that I'm really interested in hearing your opinions and needs about is print copies and print on demand as a service. We in the past have had lots of different approaches to print on demand and print. Right now our approach has been press books will let you generate print ready PDFs, but it's very much up to you to take it to your print on demand service and print copies of your books. We've heard from lots of your people, lots of opinions on this, but I'm really curious to know for those of you who are making books, what has been your approach to print and print on demand and what would make your lives easier when it comes to printing books or print on demand? What do you do? What do you want? I would say we haven't had much expressed interest in it. I mean that doesn't necessarily mean that the interest isn't there, but there's nothing coming from the ground up organically that I've heard in terms of requesting that as a function or feature. Have you ever made print editions for any of the books that you published, Michael published a time? Maybe like almost a decade ago we had a book that was simultaneously, not a press book, but like an OER thing that was a kind of a course pack that was simultaneously digital and printed through the university's print service, but eventually like no one cared enough about the print anymore. It just didn't become a worthwhile endeavor. It was like it was cost prohibitive essentially was what it boiled down to. I mean that's always been our observation here is that even if people prefer print, and I'll be honest, I prefer print. I've never read a single ebook from start to finish, but if it's free, they prefer free even more. They prefer free to a cost no matter what that is. Interesting. Okay. Amy, I know that you've done a lot at Open Oregon with print. You've done the petting zoo and other things. What's what's been your current approach to print and print? Yeah. Well, we feel like print is an important option for accessibility or digital divide issues, preferences, you know, whatever. There's a lot of reasons that people might want print. And so when somebody says, ta-da, I'm done, I'll say, do you want us to set up a print copy in Lulu? And Lulu is sort of like the good enough solution for us right now because they're the lowest cost and they know what open licenses are and we can set the revenue to zero so that person buying the print copy is just paying for the print service. We're not, you know, adding anything onto that. So you use Lulu. When you've set up a book for print on demand for Lulu, how do you make people, how do you let people know that there's a Lulu copy available? Do you list it? I put the link in the short and long description of the press book metadata. The thing about Lulu is that, you know, I've had some pushback like, you know, hey, they're underselling our print shop, which has staff who are union members and that's why our labor costs are higher. I haven't been able to find anything out about Lulu's model and why they are the cheapest. And, you know, I even like heard that you knows the person who founded Lulu and tried to like reach out to you for a connection, you know, like I just can't get a person at Lulu to explain why they're cheap. So that's the thing. I mean, and Lulu's like setup wizard is quite clunky. Like it's not, like I said, it's kind of like the solution that's working the best for us for right now. But if something better came along, that would be nice too. So, and then the one other thing that I will mention is that we are working with a book designer and a theme developer because we want to have a two column layout for our eight and a half by 11 books. And that, I mean, that's really exciting, this book designer, like she's amazing. Her work is beautiful. So I'm excited to be able to share that theme. I'm not quite sure when that'll be. Yeah. Sorry, we weren't able to take that work on, but I'm glad we were able to connect to someone and I've been following those emails with interest. I think it's going to look really nice when it's done. So cool. Thanks. Okay. Others that have thought about print or done things with print Lauren or Kate, have either of you been working with print or thinking about print on demand? Yeah, I just shared in chat that I also don't see many people request it. Like instructors, when they ask me about print options, I just send them to lulu.com. But I think that's only been two people in the many years of supporting the network. And the only thing I could think of that may exist and I don't know about it as some kind of checklist for folks to make sure that the copy that they have is print ready. That's such a great idea. We've talked about that a little bit and our customer success team. Right now, I think the best thing available is that what's in that Rebus book, there's a Rebus checklist. And I think BC campus has a similar one, but we don't provide anything, but definitely could if there was enough need or interest for that, like, how do you know if your book's ready for print distribution, there could be a simple kind of checklist, kind of like what we're doing with the network managers. Mitch, I don't know if you have any ideas about that or that's something that's come up with you or Thomas or Amy before, but you do love to hear you speak to that. I haven't like we haven't discussed it lately, but I think it's a really like good idea to have, you know, like I'm sure there is that that is one of the key questions, right, that people are confronted with. So like I'm definitely taking that back to our conversations about what material we can documentation can provide on that. Thanks. Kate or Allison, anything you want to add to the conversation about print? Yeah, I was just going to add that our experience has been the same as Lauren's. There's not been very many faculty who have been very interested in it, but a few have gone to Lulu. My understanding is that there is a way that they can also have students who are interested in print send it to the bookstore and purchase it through the bookstore at cost, but I've not really been around long enough to know like how that process works and who organizes that. So that is another option I think, you know, is available, but maybe isn't very well publicized. Yeah, thank you. Allison, Alia, Tracy, anything you want to add? I think we've had a similar experience at U of O with we've used Lulu a little bit, but also just don't get very many requests for print. And I'll just add that I really don't work with that part of it. I'm the network manager, but I don't really, yeah, really involved with that part of it. But thanks for asking. Okay, yeah. I think last person I asked Simon, I know you weren't in a position to unmute earlier, but if there's anything you want to add, welcome to drop it in the chat. So one of the things that we have been, okay, great. One of the things we've been looking at or thinking about has been how can we make making print copies easier and getting those print copies in the hands of people who want to use them because it is very much as Amy said, a digital divide and sometimes an accessibility issue. So the website, the web book, as people know, allows people to download those formats, but it doesn't make it very easy to buy a print copy. And so one thing that we have been thinking about and maybe exploring the future is a integration with the print on demand service where you could, from press books, send it to print on demand service and then list the sale copy directly on the homepage of your book just to make that easier. Another potential option would be to allow book creators of all types to sell their books to sell the digital and the print content to set a price. Obviously, people who are doing open educational publishing or open publishing may not be as interested in that, but there are a lot of press books users who are doing all rights reserved or self-published authors who take their content from press books and sell it elsewhere. And reducing the number of steps and the complexity of that is something that we have an interest in exploring and helping those users succeed. So nothing immediate plan, but that's on our minds, it's on our radar, and we'll be certainly discussing this and talking about this in future meetings. If you have thoughts or ideas that you think of between now and then, I think you know where to find me, please do. I'm always interested to hear what your needs and desires are. We really want to build a print or a print on demand solution that best satisfies your goals and objectives rather than what we think your goals and objectives are. So please keep this in mind and keep that in particular in mind. All right, that's it from what I wanted to share in the recording. I'm going to pause the recording and it's going to be community roundtable time. So really love to hear projects and things you've been working on and things that you think would be of interest to the larger community. All right, I just wanted to say thank you everybody for coming out. Really enjoyed serving you and supporting the uses and needs that you have. Thank you for coming to our June update and we'll see you again in July. Until then, be safe, be well, and enjoy.