 Hi everybody, welcome to the March Pressbooks Monthly Product Update. I'm Steel Wagstaff, the Product Manager at Pressbooks. And what I want to start today is to give an introduction or show you the big changes that we made to the Pressbooks interface in the last month. So you had seen, if you've come to these in the past, you've seen some previews of it, but now it's real, it's live, it's in production. And I'm going to give an overview of the large scale changes we made for network managers and for general end users. So I'm going to log in as a network manager to Pressbooks. So I've just logged in. And as a network manager, the first thing I'm going to see is I'm going to be greeted by a welcome page that's specifically customized for me as a network manager. You'll see here the administer network dashboard has been selected, and we have a much more consolidated and compressed set of options for me as a network manager to administer my network. We clarified and kind of simplified things so that instead of having to go to several similar looking dashboards, there's now a single consolidated dashboard, as well as a bright, hopefully cheerful presentation for who you are, what you're doing and what you might want to do next. So you'll see that there's a welcome page. It's going to give you the name of your network. There's a little block here that will tell you how many books and users you have on your network. And you have the ability here, if you're on a hosted network for Pressbooks, to drill down and view some of these more detailed stats which would show you users over time, books over time, network storage, revisions over the last several months, and the number of clone books that have been made from your network since the beginning of this year. So that's the first thing you'd see on your dashboard. The other things we're trying to do is kind of help you do common network manager tasks, specifically thinking about if you're brand new to administer your Pressbooks network, here's the first things that you may want to do. Your network has a homepage, your homepage typically look like this before it's been customized. And so you have the ability to control all of the text and the calls to actions you display here. You have the ability to showcase books on your homepage and link to your catalog to customize your menus and your footer. There's quite a lot that you can do to make this network feel like your institutions network. And the way that you do that I guess is in this block we tell you you can customize the appearance of your network. This is an option here that will give you all of the controls needed to change that page I just showed you to make it more of what you want. You can change the title on the tagline you can add a logo a site icon, you can change which page you display on the front page of your network whether it's your homepage or any other page that you've created. You can also choose to display showcase books, anything in your catalog you could pick so I could say, let's add this book as a fifth featured book on my network, and you'll see now it's being showcased here, or a third third featured book I apologize. You can choose to show or hide this feature from your homepage altogether. You can choose to display a contact form, if you do display the contact form. It will show up on the homepage and look kind of like this, and we'll go to whatever email you want to send it to. You can also change if you have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you can include those links to your institution social pages there. And you can customize the colors to fit the branding scheme of your organization. You can want a different header image, for example, like let's say I don't like these peaks. I want to go blue. I want to put this image or I want to look very library ish, or whatever desired kind of header you want you can just put the header of your dreams up there and display the header. And then you have the ability to customize the menu items at the top or the bottom of your homepage. And this is where you can add and customize what appears in each of those menus and the locations. Last but not least, there's a couple of widgets that display in the bottom block. You can add some custom text. I'm a header. And you'll notice as I add this here it's going to appear in this footer area. And I could add links images whatever I'd like to do to customize that kind of semi footer on my network. There's two blocks there so if you haven't want to have content that next to each other you can do that. And you can add custom CSS to change the styling or the appearance of this page if you want to use that with caution obviously. Those are the things that you can do there from that additional or from that starter menu to customize the network appearance. You can also create or edit the content of the pages themselves from this link. This will take you to the pages menu, my homepage could be edited here, and all of the tools and skills needed to update this homepage. So, if I wanted to say, we're glad to talk you through the many options. I've just made an edit, and now my homepage of my network will now say many options instead of options. So if I wanted to see that I could go view the homepage and see. I now edited the content so it says many options. You'll also see you have the ability if you're on a hosted network to see the page view analytics for your homepage and other pages. So clicking on this link will show you the cocoa analytics dashboard here. And this shows me how much web traffic my network homepage and other related pages have received over the given time period. You can customize this and show you this for the quarter of the year or whatever you'd like to see. And you can see the most popular page on my home site is my homepage, and my catalog is the second most popular page that it's received this many views. Here's where visitors are coming from. Most people are finding this through Google, some through Bing, some through you can see search engines are the biggest refer for my particular site. And that's what's available there in the dashboard for your homepage tools. Each of these links correspond to some links that you'd see over on the side as well so you can navigate them from other locations as well. And then you have the big kind of core tools that network managers will use which are how to administer your network. The first thing you'll see are a bunch of settings you can get to that here or here. These are all of the choices that you have as a network manager. This will tell you who your network managers are, how to get help or support from press books. How many people have been using results for LMS if you have that additional add on. And then you also have a bunch of sensible defaults that you can control and set as a network manager for your network. And then you also have your books upload to today's storage size, the default language, the default page size for PDF exports, iframes, and whether or not your books will be included or not included in the directory. You also have settings for user book and user registration. These are detailed and explained in the guide, and there's the Google analytics optional integration. And we mentioned this in a past webinar but you can use Google analytics the old one or Google analytics for we really do recommend that if you want Google analytics you move to GA for because they're shutting down the old way of doing things in on July 1. So, if you are using them, please transition to the new method before January 1. Some of the things that are available there from the network settings. If you're hosted with press books you also get a really powerful book and user list that let you kind of filter and sort and understand more about the books that are being published on your network. So here down below you'll see cover title last edited created words, whether or not my book is public in the catalog with license with subject. How many people have different roles, who the book admins are the storage size the language the theme, and whether results is turned on. You can also filter by a bunch of different things so I might want to see who what are all the public CC BY books on this network. I've got 20 of them. And these are the books I could download it as a CSV and do more analysis on it. I could also say I want to see books that have more than 5000 words. And now I'm down to 16. And I want to see books that use the Malala or McLuhan theme. And then I'm down to 10. So you can mix and match those filters you can reset them at any time. And you can always download this list as a CSV for further analysis. You can also do things like make public make private add to catalog remove from catalog add or disallow grading and delete books in mass on mass in bulk from this book administration menu. I have a very similar option for users. So you'll see there's a user list. It allows you to see who's been added since a given date, when they've last logged in, what kind of role they have, or if they have a given role in a certain number of books. So for example, I might want to see everybody who's a super user prospects I want to see someone who's an administrator at three or more books. And here I've just got 12 users. I can download this list and I can email them and invite them all to a power users training session. Okay, who hasn't logged in in the last two years. All right, so these eight people they really haven't logged in for at least two years, I might contact them and make sure they still want their accounts or I might just want to say, you know what you haven't been for a while I'm going to remove you from the network, or whatever my policy is for that. So those are those tools you have there for user management. And those are also linked from the administrator dashboard page. So these are the most common tasks that network managers have or want to perform. So we've displayed them there in a prominent place on the dashboard and cleaned up the options over here. Finally, you'll see there's a new support resources block, which points you to places that you can get help as a network manager. So there is a guide I referenced that earlier if you click this link, you'll see detailed guide documentation for all of the things I just described. How to administer books, how to administer users, how to customize the appearance, how to create an edit pages, all the things I just mentioned, they have detailed guide chapters that tell you how to do these things in more detail if you want to read them. There's a community forum that we maintain and host. There is obviously on the community forum. There is a public section where anyone can post and answer questions. There's a specific group for press books clients. These are the people that are network managers. And this is a space for you to talk with other network managers. Sometimes the questions you have aren't support questions. There are more questions about how do I do this as a publishing program how do I do this as a, how do I approach this thing generally. We want this space to be a place where you can give and receive mutual aid and talk to one another. If you aren't a part of this space and want to be let us know and what happily add you there. And that's a place that you can go to talk with peers. So that's linked here. We also have a series of free webinars that we offer an ongoing basis. This links to the webinars page on our website and you can see what's coming up in the next few months. So you'll see we've got a getting started session next week at advanced session the week after another getting started another event session in May, and there will be occasional kind of one offs for network managers and other things scheduled in the future. The final thing you'll see is if you are a hosted network with us, we provide premium support to our network managers, and this link will take you directly to just send us an email and file your question or support. So that's the big change we made for network managers. It's this dashboard and these menu links here. I'm going to pause and take any questions. Okay, so my big question for you is network managers are what's missing. Is there anything that you really need or want to have that you don't have now that would make your life as a network manager easier. Do you think it's something later, please do let us know. Nothing would make me happier than to know that we built something that met your needs I mean that sincerely. Let's go back into the screen share and I'll show you a couple other changes that have made that have happened so this is a change that's not just for network managers this is a change for all users of press books. It's this top nav bar here. We have cleaned up and simplified it. If you are a member of a one or more books you'll see your books in a list here, and this will take you directly to the dashboard of a book that you are a user in. And you can do all of the book level things here. You'll see a similar dashboard appears for all users of the book that tells them what they can do and a simplified menu with new icons over here. The changes we made to the top dashboard we made it larger and a bit more visible, and we added some permanent buttons that you can access anywhere from the from the press fix interface. Before it was a little confusing if you wanted to make a new book or clone a book you didn't always know where to go. So now there is a user dashboard, new users will see this when they log in. They will see an invitation to create a book or adapt a book, and they will also see permanent buttons here to create or clone books, if they have the permission to do this in the network, creating a book will just take you to the new clone page. Cloning a book will take you to our cloning page. And if you hadn't seen before, we've got this new integration here that lets you search the directory. So if I were to search for human rights, I would see publicly available clone books I could clone, I could select a book for cloning and just clone it directly from the interface there. So that makes the adapting and cloning experience easier and more enjoyable. The last thing is if you are a network manager, you will see a button that lets you add users easily. This will just take you to a bulk add new user page where you provide a bunch of emails, and they will be added to your network as regular users. This is a new feature. So we had bulk add users at the book level, but we didn't have it at the network level. We added this because networks managers sometimes wanted to add 30 people at once for a training session. And this is a way to just do that on mass and send them all email invitations so that when they log in, they would come to see a new page or menu that looks like this. And then as we've simplified and kind of changed a little bit of how your profile picture appears, this will show you your gravitar image if you have one, and there's a link here where you can edit and update your profile. You can add your name. You can add information about yourself. You don't have to add any of this, but this will be used in your individual books as part of your bio or your profile. You can take a little bit of time and some steps if you want to be displaying information about yourself elsewhere in the site. So that's what's happened and changed for the dashboard here. Yeah, there's a question in the chat. What happens to the material created by individuals that no longer work at your institution, and you want to delete the inactive account. That's a great question. I believe your institution as a network manager, you have total power to remove their accounts, delete their accounts, update their email addresses, however you want to manage those users that's totally up to you. What will happen is you'll be invited to delete the user. And then when you delete the user, their content will remain on the network and tell and unless you decide to deactivate or delete it. I'll give you an example of that flow. If you want to see it, would that be helpful misty? And I can administer users here. So let's say who's someone who hasn't logged in for a long time. All right, my great. It's been three years since they've logged in. So I'm going to delete them from my network. There's a menu that makes it seem a little bit scary, but we don't actually delete the content, even if you say delete all content. So you can ignore this part of we can probably improve and change that you could, you can choose whatever you want. The book won't actually be deleted, but to be safe, I could say let's attribute all of their content to steal. And I'm going to say confirm deletion. This user has been deleted. So their users gone from my network. I could add them or sign them up again later. But the books that they created are still there. And if I wanted to delete a book, I'd have to come in here. So I think one of those books was called Liz something. So, okay, here's the Liz demo book. Let's say there's nobody left. There's still people left in this book, but I bet I can find a book that has no admin users. So let's find one that has nobody. And this book has nobody in it. This English composition book. So I think it's safe to delete. If I'm not sure I can deactivate it, which means it's only visible to me as a network manager but it's for all intents and purposes gone so I can just do this and deactivate it. It's going to ask me are you sure and I see it. I want to deactivate this book. You'll see it with this kind of red highlighting which shows me that it's deactivated. If I'm really ready to permanently delete it, let's go ahead and permanently delete it. It asked me to confirm and that book is gone. So that's how you can remove users and remove books or content from your network if you want to do that. The second question I saw was, it's interesting that create and clone adapt are featured so prominently on the user dashboard. So yes, I'm in the three most common things that people will do. If they are new users or network managers, they often want to make new books or clone books. And then once they've made a book, this is where usually they're going most often. So we just wanted to make sure like okay, there's three things you do when you log in to press books, you go to a book and you edit and revise it, you make a new book or you adapt a book. So those three options should be visible and kind of apparent at all times from your dashboard so that you don't have to dig and hunt to find it. We also thought many people were finding they wanted to make a new book or clone a book, but they didn't automatically think to look at my books because they hadn't done it yet. And so that was confusing people tripping them up so we've done a bunch of user research surveys and they said, if you just didn't hide it under my books or my catalog it'd be more obvious to me where I could do that. So that was one of the changes we made to support that. Cheryl asked, do deactivated books count toward the tier pricing totals. I don't know, John, do you know the answer to that I don't think they do but john might know. So no in in our dashboard. When a book is deactivated. It doesn't we don't count it in our dashboard it's still on your network but we don't count it towards the tier. Thanks john and Cheryl hope that answered your question so you don't have to permanently delete if you want to not count it towards a tier limit that you can just deactivate the book. All right, those are the big ones that's what we spent most of our time working on. There's a handful of assorted bug fixes and other things that we shipped and released a kind of smaller one but that you might have noticed is if you are displaying books in a catalog on your site. I'll give you just a second to show you what I mean by this. Everybody who has a precipice network has the ability to showcase books on their homepage, and we have a new rebuilt catalog, where you can display and customize your individual catalog here. Well there was a bug before where we weren't breaking, we were breaking words in weird places so like this might say non dash TRAD and then it would just go to the next line with traditional. We just changed the styling so that words break at a more logical place here. We're not doing a lot of hyphenation but we're just breaking it so that a word doesn't suddenly break in the middle of the word for these display things. If there are other little tweaks or things that you've noticed about your catalog that aren't working as expected. Please let us know and we're, I mean this is a relatively new feature and we've tried to catch and fix most of the bugs that we're aware but if there are small residual things please do let us know and we'll fix them as quickly as we can. So I've been talking to you in the past several meetings about the question of discoverability. And what we mean by that is, when you publish a book, you've made a book public, but attracting people to it or letting them know that this is a different challenge. So there's several things that press books does or can do to help you achieve your publishing aims. The first thing that we do is we add relevant metadata and micro data in ways that conform with broadly accepted open media standards. So we use Dublin core metadata and schema dot org metadata and attach it to the book and chapter level, based on what you've provided in your book info page. That really helps for search engines for Google and anybody else who's looking on the web to say, Oh, this book has good metadata, and it can be used by search and other kind of providers. Another thing we've done is add the catalog that we give you the network link so you can showcase your books. And the third thing that we do is we collect the open metadata for all open access books and display it in the press books directory. And we know that there are other places that people want their books to be discovered. So many of you list your books other places, some of you take them to institutional repositories. Some of you list them in the open education works library. And there are in the library world I would say probably two really big discovery service provider companies, there's EBSCO and there's ex Libris. Both of them maintain large discovery tools and databases that academic libraries frequently subscribed to and provide access to. So over the past several months we've been talking to both of those companies and in this last month we announced a partnership with EBSCO where we are providing metadata from the press books directory at no cost to EBSCO and EBSCO is ingesting it into its discovery tools. We described it here on our blog and you can read more about it there if you like. Basically what happened was the product manager at EBSCO was a former press book network manager. She'd use press books you love press books you from mountainhood community college here in Oregon, and she said she came to us and said, we have this tool called faculty select that's designed to help faculty choose free or low cost material for textbooks in their course. Obviously for that tool to be more effective we want as many free and open license books as possible in that. How can we get books in the press books directory into this discovery tool. And so we had a conversation about that, and it resulted in a partnership between our two organizations where we're providing them with regular dumps of the press books directory metadata, and they have now included in their discovery tools. If you don't want your books to be included in these other discovery tools, then the simple thing is to opt out of inclusion in the directory, or to make the book private or those kinds of things but generally speaking when people publish a book and make it public with metadata. The idea is that many days open and can be consumed hopefully by people who use the interoperable metadata standards and so we're trying to improve that. The number one piece of feedback I heard from other people is, that's great but we don't use that scope we use ex Libris discovery tools what about that. And so we have been in conversation with ex Libris we're talking with them now. I think we would like to explore doing something similar with ex Libris, so that those of you who's use Alma or Primo as your discovery tool would have the same opportunity. I know that is there they were a little bit later to engage with us on that. But a lot of you have talked to them and have talked to us and so we're trying to do our part there. For those of you on the call who think a lot or care a lot about discoverability. How does that sound to you does that how would that meet your needs are their concerns questions things that you want or don't want out of those partnerships or discoverability relationships in the future. The library that has all my Primo. I'll just say at the University of Arizona we would be very interested in this. I think the ex Libris version of faculty select is called leganto, and I know as you has adopted that but we have not. So, my preference would be that this would be discoverable and Alma Primo rather than look on or maybe in addition to leganto. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Most everybody we talked to with ex Libris has been talking to us about Alma Primo first. So I don't know the answer to that I had my very first conversation with their product owner earlier this week. Things will take a little bit of time to get to like, I'm sure lawyers are going to have to drop an agreement, even though it's the non commercial deal but that's how companies work I think so we'll have to work through that and figure out questions about that. EBSCO is a paid service is that right. This is discoverability for some folks but not the open internet. I think so I'm not a, I'm not the world's expert on EBSCO and their products. EBSCO has the EDS discovery service and they have the faculty select product. I don't know if you have to be an EBSCO subscriber to use faculty select. So the librarians are saying yes. So in these particular cases, the people who benefit from inclusion and faculty select are subscribers to faculty select. It doesn't impact like prospect directory is still free and you can still discover it there. This is just the open metadata is flowing into a proprietary discoverability tool I think that's the case for both ex Libris and EBSCO. I don't, I don't know the politics of library discoverability and the degree to which there's a open source self hosted alternative. If there is one and you use it and you want us to send metadata to them, I would have no problem doing that. So far, I've heard it. They're not paying us. They're not paying us anything and we're not. This is totally not commercial. So we did this described in our blog but we're, this is open metadata and our feeling is it should be open metadata. So, Nick, I believe so, but that's a good, my understanding is that going in the EDS, which is the EBSCO discovery service layer and EBSCO faculty select is probably the primary product that it's or collection is being included. So those other questions about what EBSCO, what services and products that plan to put in. I don't know the specific answer to that we could find out or you could ask EBSCO directly. Here's the blog post that I mentioned earlier. That's basically everything I know about it. I'm not, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know the EBSCO product space as well as any other precipice product space. All right, so that's what I wanted to share with the discoverability and what's coming. Cheryl, thanks for your input about the ex Libris world. Is there anyone else that has feelings or thoughts about and a potential ex Libris partnership or what you would or would not want out of a relationship going forward. Yeah, Liz, thank you. Okay. All right, so the next things I want to kind of give you a sense of, I gave you a preview of, I think that we're going to be exploring partnerships with other discoverability tools. We really want to be guided by you on this. I have heard from more people there are more people that said, This is nice EBSCO but I actually want ex Libris than I heard saying, Yeah, EBSCO so I want to make this a comparison about which vendor whatever but what I'm hearing from EBSCO so far is this news sounds really nice but can I have it for the product that we pay for and we use. So we're trying and we'll do our best there. If you have other questions or objections or concerns or things you want to air with me in private, you, I think you know where to reach me I'm always willing to listen and discuss that honestly. The other things I think we're thinking about doing are, we'd like to build some more analytics and more exportable data for you as network managers. So I have a little bit of what I have in mind and I can kind of show you and talk you through it, and then you can tell me whether that sounds great and what sounds not so great and if you want to see other things that we're not providing. So what we provide right now for network managers is largely kind of on this stats page. So you'll see here. I'll show you for example network you can see users over time books over time. You've revisions made over the last period network storage and most clone books. The first thing that I'd like to do that I've heard from you is you love these charts but they're not very shareable with its leaders at your institution. So what we're considering doing would be let's say you wanted to show the story of growth from pandemic growth or something like that we'll say let's start with January 2020. I'm going to go January 2020 to the present. Here's the story of usage. We started with just six users and here we are at 60. What I want to what I'm going to like to give you is for each of these visualizations the download CSV option. So you can download the underlying data and look at it presented display it to shape stakeholders and other people at your institution. So we'd like to try to add download CSV buttons for all of the existing graphs and charts. That's one change we want to make based on feedback from you. The other thing that we'd like to do is, as you know, in press books you have the analytics. You have these cocoa analytics that we provide detailed pay view information for your homepage, and each book has its own dashboard. You can get a roll up view if you use Google analytics, but we don't give you tools right now to get a roll up view for everything on your network but out visiting the dashboards one by one. That can be a little bit tedious. So our plan is on this on, let's see, let me go back on this page what we'd like to provide for you is a new input where you can put a start date and date, and there can be a download CSV button. And what it will do is it will download roll up stats that will include visitors, page views and book downloads for every book on your network. I'm going to show you an example, but I think what I'm going to do is stop screen sharing before I do so that. Yeah, great question. So for right now, it's just total downloads. Would you want them perform at what would you want? Yeah, okay, so I'll make a note that's in the you're interested in. Simon, I'm not sure we don't we don't make delivery day promises but this is at the top of our backlog and it's something we're planning to work on in our next sprint starting in April. So you'll, you'll, if we do make progress on it have something, hopefully they'll have an update to share at the April product update, and maybe it'll even be production by then but I can't promise. I know that it's important to us. I want to make sure that what we're doing is things that are important to you I've heard from many people that these are what they want most other other things or ideas that you have that come to mind. Data that would be helpful for you to understand the impact of your publishing program or make a case to people who fund your program that this is working in matters to you. Right, quiet group so if you do think something elsewhere and want to share please do. I'm always interested to hear that and the earlier we hear the better we can plan and build those things. Some other things that are on our kind of future horizon. We want to make improvements to our how we handle math and other scientific notation. In particular we have a math jacks integration that's a few years old that could use a refresh and update. So instead of features related to that that we want to improve but chief among them is, we want to improve support for types of syntax delimiters. Right now we make people do a little bit of a cumbersome step if you want the math to be included properly in your export formats, we make you use a custom press book shortcode. I think tech authors aren't accustomed to doing that don't like doing that and it's a bit of a fine replaced mess. So we'd like to fix that, as well as make a series of kind of more detailed improvements that will raise Jonathan's eyebrows. I think he's probably the only person on the call that's really deep into this, and I will carry on that conversation outside the call with him. But if you have users that are advanced stem authors or math writers, please do feel free to put them in touch with me. We're going to get a kind of group advisory group of power math users to make sure that what we build satisfies their needs, as we start this work. And then we also have some improvements to the results for our best product on the docket, we want to make sure that it's working reliably and consistently and the user experiences smooth and great for everybody. So that's what's coming for us next. Any questions for me about the product or what we're working on it. And why. Thank you everybody for joining us at the March precipice product update. We'll see you again in April and until then thank you for all you do to support publishing at your various institutions and organizations.