 Hi everyone, welcome to the March Pressbooks product update. I'm Steel Wagstaff, the Pressbooks product manager. And today I wanna share with you some of the things that we have been working on and released recently with Pressbooks and the directory. And then we'll leave some time at the end for people to share their triumphs, highlights, things of interest that might be of interest for the community. First thing I wanna do is drop in the agenda so you can see and follow along if you want to see links or references to any things we talked about. So I just put that in the chat and I'm gonna share my screen here in just a moment and show you the first of the changes that we have made. So you'll notice if you go into Pressbooks and you're running the latest version, the latest release of Pressbooks, which is 5.19.0, you'll see a couple of changes have been made to the book info page. The first one is we fixed some things where we will now allow you to include links that will function in both the short description and the long description. The short description doesn't support a visual WYSIWYG, but if you were to manually add the HTML for a link, we will sanitize it and include it in the short description. And then the long description has a little visual editor so links will work just like this. You can click the link button. If I were to save those changes and you were to view the book, you would see now there's a link here in the short description. And then if you were to scroll down, this is a very big book, but scroll down. You can see that there's now a link in the long description. So those features now work. And if you had them previously or if you were struggling with them before, we are sanitizing those links, but you can include them in short and long descriptions. I'm looking at the chat to see if I missed something. Okay, great. The second thing that we did is there's a place that you're asked to add a subject heading. The subject headings are really important for classifying your book. And they're often important for people that are trying to use the directory to find books on a given subject. So we've clarified a little bit more, given some better instructions, so that people know where these subject terms are coming from and how they can find the right subject term. So for everybody, you'll see the subject field. The terms are coming from a group called FEMA. FEMA is an international standard for book subject categorization. And if you were to click this link, it would explain to you what FEMA is and what the standard is. It's maintained by this international organization that has core subject headings. They're all released under a permissive FEMA license so that we can include them in the open source version of press books. And now, if you were to look here, there's a little helper that will help you browse their category list to find the appropriate subject. So this tool can let's say, I'm not sure what the right subject is for mine, so I'll look in social sciences. I can see, oh, education is a subheading and then I can look through there. Or I could also look for open education and see what comes up. Oh, okay. This tells me the right subject heading to use is open learning distance education. So I could come in here and then type open learning and you'll see, okay, I had found the subject term that I'm looking for. So there's some updated instructions for using FEMA that should be a little bit more helpful to guide people as they're picking the prompt. It's a pretty minor change, but we hope it's helpful. And then for those of you who are on our press books networks, there's also a bisac subject. Most people don't use this. Most of you don't need to use it. Bisac is the US specific subject term. We think FEMA is better and more general bisacs proprietary as well. But if you are really addicted to bisac, we've added a bit of instructions and link people up to the bisac subject heading list. Bisac and FEMA do work together and there is a FEMA mapping for every bisac subject. This is way more detailed than you probably want or need. We recommend that users use the FEMA subjects here and the instructions are updated, but those are some of the changes and the updates that we've been making recently. In the very near future, we will be updating the FEMA list to be the most recent FEMA update as well as the bisac list. So you'll have the newest subject terms available. FEMA, fortunately, is backward compatible. So you can keep on using whatever you wanted to use or you can use any of the new terms as they become available. I saw a question in the chat about short and long descriptions. Do I need to go back into Book Metadata and take action to make those live links? Or will press books understand that URLs should be links going forward? No, we don't automatically convert a URL into a link, but you can make it a link manually by adding the AHRF tag around a word in the short description or creating a link like if I were to just type that would not be a link, but if I were to click the link button, it would become a link. So that's how you'd make it into a link there for the long description and then for the short description, you'd have to manually convert it there. So thanks, that was a very good question. So those are two changes that we've made recently for press books. Another change that we made that might be of interest to some people, probably not as many folks on this call, but some of our clients or some of our users are not based in the United States or Canada, they're based internationally. And so we produced British English translations for press books and for some of our themes so that if you're in the UK or Australia or New Zealand or another Commonwealth country where you prefer British spelling to American or Canadian spellings, you can apply that in your book and let me close these and show you what that would look like. So here's a network where we're running that and you'll notice rather than my catalog, it's my catalog with the British spelling. And if you were to go to something like the appearance customizer, you'll notice color has the U. So it's not a huge, huge change, but those translations are available. So if you prefer British localization, that's available as an option for people in press books now. The people who are most affected probably already know about that, but we just wanted to note that. We're always interested in localizing and making press books more available for users around the world. We support many different languages and that's a new one that we've added. We also released a new version of our SAML plugin. It's pretty minor update, but what it allows us to do is to log SAML login attempts. So we have more information in case something goes wrong with your SSO. It helps us debug it more easily. It won't affect end users or network managers at all. It just provides us more information in case you have a problem or running into issues with SAML debugging. Those are the big or the small updates or features that we were releasing with press books. The thing to look forward to in the near future is the updates for the FEMA and the BISAC subjects. So that's what's been happening lately in the press books core product and related things. The other thing that's really that we've been spending a lot of time working on that's been pretty exciting for us is the press books directory. So I'm gonna share my screen and show you some of the directory changes that we've made. First, you'll notice now if you go to the live directory, there'll be a new button here that says take the tour. We showed this last time. It was about to be released. It has now been released. So if you click on the take the tour button, you'll see a little JavaScript overlay that will take you through the main features of the directory. It can be keyboard navigated or navigated with your mouse, but if you click next, it will kind of walk you through the book, explain what the search bar does, show you how to search for multiple words and what that does, show you how to use exact phrases with quotes, show you how to exclude a word with the minus sign, and then it will show you how to do a search, will show you how to interpret your results, will show you how to use the facet filters here to include exclude things, and then it will show you how to clear them if you've applied them. It will show you how to interpret a book card, how to read this information, and then it will show you other information about the visual icons, et cetera. So it's a nice little tour that kind of takes you through the major components of the directory, and then at the end, it will link you to the guide chapter if you want to learn more. So we think that's a nice feature and it helps people orient themselves to the directory and use it if they haven't before. That's available now in the PressFix directory. Another thing you can do though is if you search, you'll notice it will automatically shift your focus to the search results. The same thing happens if you change pagination. So we're just helping prompt people to where they wanna go. A different change that we made, Josie mentioned this in our last call, she's not here today, but the description field, we will pull the long description for a book if it's available. If it's not available, we'll display the short description. So here's a book, this World Mythology book, I'll show you an example. So World Mythology, you can see that in the PressFix directory, we're using Insights string. If you were to visit the book itself, it has a short description, which is different, and it has a long description, which is here. We're gonna prefer and display the long description when it's available, but there are some books that don't have a long description and only have a short description. So an example of that is, what was the one that I was gonna use? Now I've forgotten. It was this one, it was Climate, Introduction to Climate Science, okay, thanks. So here I've searched a book and I found this Introduction to Climate Science book from Open Oregon, or Open Oregon State, sorry. So here you'll see this has a description field, but if I visit the book itself, this is coming from the short description. The book doesn't actually have a long description at all. So that's how the directory is working now. Whether you have a short description or a long description will display one or the other. Our preference is for the long description because usually those are more descriptive, but if there is none, we'll display the short description in this place. That was a change that people had requested and we were really happy to implement that. Thank you especially to Ricardo who worked on that and built that for us. Another thing that we've done is in the license and subject fields, there was previously, or sorry, in the license and network field, there was a no value empty option. Well, every book has a license, by default there's a license and every book belongs to a network. So we removed the no value empty choice because there was never going to be a no value empty choice. So that's irrelevant. So we took it out. And we are wrapping up a user experience survey. So we've asked anybody who's interested to fill out a survey to help us improve the directory. We're in the closing stages of this. We sent an email out to everybody, but if you'd like to take the survey, drop the link in. We're just asking people to give us feedback about the directory, including the product tour, the search elements, the facet filters and the book cards. We're gonna use this feedback to improve the directory as part of a redesign. Already the feedback that people have provided has been very helpful. It helps us know what's useful, what's usable and what we can still improve. This survey is open to anyone, whether they are a press books user, a press books network manager or just an ordinary person who wants to help us make a better product. It really is designed for anyone to provide us, to be back a human who's willing to use a computer. So that's almost concluded. And we're still accepting responses from that for the next couple of weeks. And then the other thing that we've been working on, I think I showed a little bit of this last time, but we're working on this idea of a featured collection. So press books will be building some featured collections to highlight and display books. So for example, there might be a language learning collection. The way that this would work is you'd click on the collection and you would see all of the books that belong to that collection here. And you would see there's a new collection tab that would let you see all of the books in a given collection. We're building that out and we hope to release that in the next month or two. It's something that we're pretty excited about and we think will help people find books on a common interest. If you have ideas or suggestions for collections that would be useful for you or that you'd like to see, we're always open to those ideas. You can submit them to us, however you like to communicate with us. And you'll also see that there's this recommended book feature that we've explained a few times. On the staging network, you could play around with it a little bit. So for example, you could turn on the recommended books filter and it would see all of the books that we have marked as recommended because they have metadata and look like they're finished and ready to go. This is still totally under development. We haven't tagged very many books. There's just 24 on the staging, but we're working on a process to review books and recommend them more regularly. And so you can see that at work in the staging. That's something that we're still working on and will be releasing in the near future. The last exciting thing I wanted to share related to the directory is we're working on an overhaul, a redesign for the directory itself. So we worked with a company that's given us some wireframes for how the directory may look based on some of the UX feedback that we've already given. So here I can just show you a wireframe. This is the existing directory. The new design will look a bit more like this. It's a bit cleaner, a bit more compact. And it will have many of the same functionality or features, but we'll be slowly implementing this redesign over the next month or two. And you'll see that the press books main site will have a similar refresh overhaul soon. So this is something we're excited about and this is coming soon. So we'll be making the directory look a bit more attractive in the near future. The last thing I guess I can demo or show is we have a little tool on the backend that allows us to manage collections and to manage whether a book is reviewed or recommended. This is still a prototype and it's only for internal use, but this is what we're gonna be using to quickly mark books as reviewed or recommended and to create collections or add them. So I might say, here's a new collection called Steel's Faves. And then I might say, you know what? I really love this book. Let me add it to the Steel's Faves collection. And that would be how we build collections on our side. Just wanted to show people that just for fun. I'm gonna pause there and stop my screen share and take questions. I know I moved pretty quickly. I'm happy to take questions about anything that you saw there in the press books demo or the press books directory changes. I noticed in the chat, Kathy says, this is a clever way to get us to clean up our metadata. Well done and a raise to someone. Okay, thank you, Kathy. We hope so too. We want to encourage people to enter good metadata so their books are more useful and findable. I also wanna let you know we're about 95% done with the very simple guide chapter and we'll make an accompanying video that will be designed just to help book authors improve the metadata that's in the directory to make it really, really simple. We should be publishing that and sharing a little training video that's maybe two or three minutes that you can use or you can share with your authors to make that metadata piece feel a little less intimidating and easier and cleaner to get done. I was hoping that we'd have it ready for today but it's not quite ready to publish. I didn't finish the review. I was a little behind. So could it be done by next week? It looks like no questions, which is unprecedented but fine with me, I guess that's great. So what I wanted to do, I guess now as we move into the community round table portion of the meeting and the idea is that if you have a project that you've been working on or if you have something that is press books related or of interest to this larger open education community, it's a great time for you to make announcements, to ask questions or to share news for things that you're excited about. So the floor is yours and I will stop the recording now unless you'd like me to include a particular part. Okay, so there was just a comment or a question about how to indicate, how to help people find a copy of the book, a print copy that's for sale. And so you can of course add a link to the short description or the long description but there's also a built in tool in your press books dashboard that can let you do this if you want a different way. So there should be a little tab that says publish in your dashboard. If you click on the publish tab, there's a pre-built form that lets you add buying links for your press books web book at any of these different retailers. So here are some kind of common old school ones. You mentioned Lulu. So I went while you were talking Amy and found this Oregon rights book which is for sale on Lulu. Here's the homepage. So let's pretend that this book here is that book. I could just go to other service and paste that link and click save changes. When I do that, what will happen is when you visit this book, there'll be a new button that says buy book. And if you click the button, it will show you all of the places you can go to buy a print copy of this book. So for example, I could just send them directly to Lulu and buy it from there. That's a couple extra clicks. You may not want to do it that way but that is a built in way that you can do it or you could of course add it to the short or the long description. I just wanted people to see that in case they weren't aware that that was there or wanted to know more about how to use it. Thanks again everyone for joining us for the product update today. That concludes the session for today. We're excited to see you again next month. Thanks for your time.