 Hi everybody. Welcome to the February Pressbooks product update. I'm Steel Wagstaff and what I want to do is start by sharing some of the recent features and things that we've released that we think might be of interest for many of you. So first let me share my screen. There is a agenda here for this meeting. It's the product update agenda. And so here we're at the new features you might have missed. I want to talk about two things that came out that are kind of core Pressbooks related. And then we'll talk about the Pressbooks directory, which is I think what most of you are excited for. So first, a couple of weeks ago we released a new minor release of Pressbooks. There were a few changes in it, but the biggest one is we noticed that there was a bug that was affecting how the cloning routine worked for very large books. It was something that we were inheriting from WordPress, having to do with the sort order and the display for large numbers of items. In particular, it would affect books that had, like this book that had hundreds of glossary terms. Anytime we got into the hundreds, there were some cases where the cloning routine would produce duplicate glossary terms and not always capture all of them. So a few weeks ago we, Oscar built this. This was one of his first contributions to Pressbooks core. So thank you Oscar. Now you'll notice that when you have a very large book in Clonet, all of the glossary terms and all of the other things will should be cloned successfully. So that was shipped a few weeks ago. If you had been noticing problems with super large book cloning previously, you could try recloning now and it should be resolved. Another big release that that feature came out. This was something that Ricardo actually worked out for us. We made some changes to our SAML SSO plugin. If you don't know what that means, that's probably okay, but this is a authentication method that's used by a lot of campuses for their net ID process. So many of you know that if you, you can hook up your Pressbooks networks to use your campus net ID authentication method. So we've changed to the SAML plugin so that we're using the SAML attribute name instead of something called the friendly name. This shouldn't affect any end users. You're just putting in your net ID and password the same, but we just refactored the kind of algorithm that we use to check for the right attributes. And it's a better, more secure way of handling SAML attribute sign on. I worked this out with all of the network managers that were affected. So some of you on the call have had some previous email exchange with me. That's in production now and we're using a slightly better method with some better fallbacks for the SAML plugin. So the thing I want to talk about next is the Pressbooks directory. So most of our energy and our effort has been iterating and improving the Pressbooks directory. The first thing that I want to show you is if you go to the actual Pressbooks directory now, you'll notice that the number of books has grown and so has the number of networks. We're really excited because we now have a bunch of open source networks that weren't initially included when we first launched the directory. I'll make this a little bit bigger. I see some people leaning forward a bit. So for example, since Clinton, Josie are here, here's the BC campus open publishing network. So I could look just for the BC campus books and you can see we've got 120 something books now for BC campus, including a lot of those open stacks books that Josie and others have worked so hard to bring into Pressbooks. Those are now discoverable from the Pressbooks directory and are pretty great. They also have this second BC campus Pressbooks network with another 200 books that's now available on this network. A lot of you know Billy Mankey at Hawaii, the Hawaii books, there's 11 of them that are really great that are now included here. Alberta is hosting a Pressbooks network for their province and an open source way. And so we're now including their books. There's another 14 or so books with a growing number. Really great stuff here. A lot of them have H5P activities, but some of you will be interested in. And then we added Plymouth State. So they that's where Robin Derosa is some of you know Robin. They have an open source Pressbooks network and now all of their books are included in the directory. Oh yeah, UMass Amherst that was really fun. So they have a bunch of great books they often come to these meetings. They have some cool theater stuff. My favorite one from UMass Amherst I shouldn't have favorites, but one that I really like from UMass Amherst. They have a great introduction to women gender sexuality studies book that's now in the directory. And they also have this really cool book about beekeeping and radical politics that I loved. Some of you may be interested as well there's a great book by Jeff East Asian Studies professor about Tokyo University and their wartime history, and then they have a cool book about a transforming systemic change in higher education, which is particularly for people who are thinking about inclusivity in STEM. So, you know, there's a bunch of great books all over the place all the people have terrific books. They're now in the directory. If you're aware of an open source network that should be included but isn't. Please let us know and we would love to work with those network managers to get their books listed in the directory if they want to have them there. So, thank you to the people at BC campus and to these other networks who did work on their side both to produce these books and also to make sure they could be listed in our directory moving forward. Another exciting change. These are some things that are coming soon. And I'm showing you them for the first time. We're going to be adding something called a product tour for the directory, and this is what it will look like in the in reality when it launches. So, when you come to the press books director there'll be a button that says take the tour. And you'll see a little JavaScript overlay that will kind of guide you through the main components of the press books directory so for example. This will say here's the search bar, and it tells you what the search bar does and what it doesn't do. And then it will give you an example. This if you want to search for multiple words you type both of them in and it uses an and operator. If you want to search for an exact phrase you can put the exact phrase in and it will search for an exact phrase with quotation marks. If you want to exclude a word or phrase you can use this minus sign and it explains what that does. And then it says here's how you conduct a search press the button and your search results will change. There's a little explainer that helps you understand the results and the sort and number of cards per page option. There's a little box that will explain how facet filters work librarians and other people that use advanced databases often know how faceting search works, but many beginning users are just used to Google and so faceting search can take a bit of explaining. So this will explain a little bit about how faceted searches work. This explains the include filter and the exclude filter and include filter will say, yes include all books that have this and exclude filter says show me only books that don't have this. Combine filters, and you can use multiple at the same time. Many of you have seen that so let me jump back to the product tour and show you. I am here at the faceted search stage, you can clear your filter buttons. This will show you where your active filters are. You can clear all the active filters by using this button. And then we kind of talk you through the book card. So each book card has a bunch of information on it. Then there's a section that shows you other information. And this tour will tell you what each of these sections mean. This is a language thing. This shows you the license hovering over it will tell the license name. This is the HP logo. We explain what HP means for people aren't familiar with it. And then at the end of the tour it says, do you want to know more about the directory there's a chapter in our guide that will show you all this stuff in great detail. So it should be coming hopefully by the end of this week maybe early March. Thanks to Oscar who's built that that's our first product tour. The first time we've done something like this it was really fun to design and build. If you have feedback for us we're always open to hear what kind of features you think should be included to make the directory more accessible or more usable for people who are encountering it for the first time. Another thing that's coming soon. We are working on something called recommended books. So the basic idea would be, as people provide more metadata about their books, we want to be able to surface and show that certain books have been recommended, or have complete metadata. So the idea would be something like this they'll be a little facet or filter that says, show me recommended books, and then you would see a little flag over here that says oh this book has been recommended. So basically what we'll try to do is recommend books that have complete metadata and that look like they're finished and ready for adoption or for use. They would need to have an open license etc. What we're planning to do is this week we're going to send out a communication to everybody. You can see it right now if you want but basically we're going to tell everybody that we're going to launch this feature soon. So what you or your authors can do to get your book eligible to be recommended in a certain way. So we're not 100% set on the language recommended we might use like complete metadata or something a bit less pushy. So the idea is, if you have updated metadata for your book and here's how you can update your metadata, and the book is looks complete or looks well made, then we'll start adding it to this recommended list. And the other thing that we may begin doing is we are going to start building what are called featured collections. So what we're going to be on the directory will display a set of collections books on a given topic or on a given subject. So for example, this might be a set of books that would be really useful for dual or high enrollment courses. So you could click on that filter. And what it would do is it would show you a whole set of books that belong to that collection. There might be a collection filter here. So you can see some of the collections that we're building out. Another example might be accessibility and inclusivity, we might have a set of books that are all about accessibility or inclusivity, and that would be an example of a collection that we built out. Another example might be vocational and trades. So these aren't actual collections they haven't built them yet this is just a demo of the idea. We might build a set of books about open education or open pedagogy. That could be a collection. And another collection might be all of the open stacks books that have been brought into press books. So we could show you all of the open stacks books. The idea is that we're going to start building a series of collections of books on given topics, and they'll be available to be kind of searched for and filtered in the directory. That's something we're really excited about. We're excited to be bringing to you in the next month or two. The other thing that we've done is we have also on the back end of press books, we have a tool that's called the directory fetcher is what we call it. And it's the tool that goes out to each network and it will grab information about books and store in a database so that we can display it in the directory. Now that fetcher runs every hour and it goes and looks for new information and it updates the directory every hour on the hour. We also have built a tool that would let us say oh let's say there's an entire network that got out of sync somehow or they made major changes or they want to just reset their their listing. And now just sync all of the books from a given network instead of having to re-sync all 2000 books. So that's a really helpful tool that helps us. So if you notice that there's something systemically wrong about your network. We don't think that will ever be the case for you if you're hosting with us, but it might, it might happen from time to time with open source network. So if we need to re-sync all of the books for one network and one network only, we have a tool that will allow us to do that now. So if you notice some things that are majorly wrong with your network, we can always fix that and re-sync them as needed. I have been working with a practicum student from McGill. His name is Travis Wall. He's terrific. He is working on a UX survey. So we're going to be sending out a survey to people, an optional survey to just ask them about their user experience, what it's like to search and find books on the directory. What works for them with the search tool, what works and doesn't work for the facets and filters, what works and doesn't work for the book cards. We expect the survey would take maybe 10 or 15 minutes to complete and we're really, we're really interested in as wide a set of responses as we can get. We will use that feedback to help us improve the interface and the search and finding experience for the directory. That's something we're really serious about doing. We want to make this easy for people to find things they're looking for. So in the next week, in addition to that recommended books message, we're expecting to send out an invitation to participate in a UX survey and would welcome feedback from anybody who wants to share responses to that survey with us. So those are the things that I wanted to share in relation to the directory. I'm going to pause there and take questions. Go ahead Anita. So, yeah, I'm interested in how the metadata works with recommended books and featured collections so sounds like you could apply the filters. And then the recommended will actually a tag saying amongst the things that match your filter these are the ones we recommend. And are they recommended because the metadata gives you a better book card. Is that how it all works. Generally, we would, I think we're still working out the criteria that we're going to use to recommend a book, because what we're not trying to say is that we vouch for the content winner. We're not trying to make a judgment about the content. What we're trying to say is this book has complete metadata, and it has an open license that allows you to clone it and remix it. That's primarily what we're trying to do with recommending books. And our recommendation is to promote the fact that this is an open licensed OER. Right. Yeah, you can feel safe, you can feel safe using cloning whatever this book because we have we this, this author or publisher has promised us that it meets the checkmark. Exactly. Yeah, and it's basically just like complete metadata. And we'll try to do like a basic quality check to be like, Oh, does it have. There's a bunch of empty chapters that say still working on still working on we probably be like let's like to recommend that until it looks like the book is done or whatever but but essentially it's what we want to try to do is help people increase the relevance of the search results that they're seeing. And so this is kind of meant to be a proxy for that to say, if you want to see books that have full metadata and that have an open license that's a quick way to kind of turn that filter on or sort the results. And how do you kind of figure out the criteria for featured collections then. It's going to be learns is something that are the internal librarians that will do mainly it's going to be Lee at press books is thinking about what do I want to do to help us like share kind of a set of books on a collection for kind of content marketing purposes generally. So, Lee has defined a set of broad collections that she's going to start with. And then over time, if people say hey I think it'd be really good to have a collection on, you know, chemistry books, or we can build math collections or we could build a collection on anything that people suggest. We have a set of like, probably eight or nine topics we know or we have at least 15 books that it kind of would belong to that topic. So we'll build out a collection of books on that topic that we think are well done or well made or good representative books. So that feature is, it can grow and expand over time but the basic idea would be, let me just kind of show the screen again. You can see any of the collections that exist will be listed here. So as new collections get added they'll just show up in the collection filter, and then you could turn on and say only show me the books that are in this collection. Let me show you on the director that has more books at my staging. If you want to see this yourself you can go to the staging. Pressbooks.directory site. Again, just note that this is a site that's always subject to change but you can you can look and play with the feature as it exists here. So for example I'd say oh let's look at the nursing healthcare books. These are not actually nursing healthcare books. These are just random books that we've given that collection title to to kind of work with this concept. But the idea would be, oh okay, there's also an interactive OER collection, some cool books that we think have really good interactive OER. So the idea would be, I'd look here and I'd say oh okay, here's a pre-built collection that someone has made of, that we, that Pressbooks has made of books that meet that topic. So we'll be always trying to review the directories as new stuff comes in and keeping those collections up to date. That'll be a task for our the Pressbook staff. A bit of human curation. Thank you for dropping that link in there Anita for others. Other people have questions about the featured collection or the featured books or the featured, let's see recommended books or featured collections features that are coming soon. Sorry if I missed this but the email message for recommended books, that's something that you're wanting network admins for us to send out to select authors on our networks. And did you say that that would be next week or what was the timing? Hopefully to send it out today or tomorrow. So I'd like to send it before the end of this week. I'll be emailing network managers. And then network managers can choose to share that with their, with anybody on their network if they'd like to or not, it's really up to them. But it's just an invitation for people to check their metadata and ensure that it's good because the directory is only as good as the metadata that's entered. We know that's extra work but hopefully there'll be an incentive for people to do it because then their books would be more visible and more useful to others. Thanks. I was just going to start by mentioning that you were going to probably if a book like had missing chapters and put some content here future kind of things you would might not put that in the featured thing. It's occurred to me that another thing that might want to sort of prioritize something going as a feature thing would be whether it's sort of fails a lot of accessibility checking. And I was just thinking about that while other people were asking questions that occurred to me. I'm not sure that would be wonderful. It's the whole press books, you know, it would be nice if you could like, click a button as a network manager manager and it would automatically run say the web bang wave tool on your entire book and all run like we're cursively run it down the tree of web pages for the ebook version. And I don't know if there's an API to that tool or, but it would be if you had, if there were a summary, it would be so neat you're right and so there are two people on this call that have probably talked with me more about this issue that anyone else in the world so Lauren from the University of Washington has been very interested in that. And also Josie at BC campus is a real accessibility expert. Yeah, I think we would love to make a better accessibility checker tool or an accessibility checker tool for press books authors. We ordered a couple of options and we haven't found something that that will work perfectly for us but it's very high on our priority list. And I would love to see us work on and deliver something that could do that in the coming year. I think Oscar and Ricardo both here hearing this. So Oscar and Ricardo will look in the future probably at some tools that would let people run a good accessibility checker on their output and having that built into the press books editor would be really great. And I see there's definitely appetite from the community for that. Lauren or Josie did either you want to add anything on that since you're both very deep in on that. No, I just, yeah, I think it would be. We have a similar we have an accessibility checker for canvas core sites and there's been a big push on our campus to have faculty use that and this comes up really regularly when I talk with instructors about creating books and press books and students who want to just know that they're what they're creating as as as accessible as possible so just plus one to that as a tool that our authors would really appreciate so. I can tell you a little bit if people are interested a little bit of the status of the research for us so that Lauren mentioned there's an accessibility tool for canvas. So what's nice about their tool is it is open source, like it's open source so last year we explored we did a demo where we integrated or plugged in that canvas accessibility tool into the press books interface. It could work it's written in a different code base and it has a very different UI so we'd have to like reskin it and restyle it but we did some testing to see whether it would be feasible or possible to do with press books and it probably could be brought into some major modifications. There's also a very popular accessibility checker tool made by blackboard called blackboard ally. It is not open source to my knowledge so we'd have to figure out how and if we could integrate that. And then the third option that we did look at was, there is also an accessibility checker tool for the tiny mce visual editor that press books uses, but it is also a proprietary tool and so we've had some conversations with them about whether we could license it and use it in the press books interface, but we don't have a good great clear answer yet and we don't know what that would look like for open source users which is another concern we have. So, so we've done a bit of initial exploration and have some ideas about the direction that could go but we don't have anything that we're ready to release yet, but it is of importance to us and we know it would make a big difference for our users and, ultimately for the downstream readers who want accessible content as well. So thanks everybody for confirming that's important to you and hopefully we'll have a good update in one of these future meetings about exciting things to share or to test or progress made on that I have a quick question it's not really about the demo but I noticed with the directory that the when you display the description for a book you're pulling from the long description rather than the short description. And in my experience people are much more likely to fill out the short description than the long description so I was just wondering why that decision is made. Yeah, good question. So we do the book directory displays the long description rather the short description and the short answer is that's because that's the field that's available that was made available in the API. So, we could. Yeah, we've noticed the same thing. So we're going to be thinking about that and changing that. So, in case you weren't quite following what you're saying it's a little bit technical. Let me just show you an example. When you build a book and you go to your book info page. There are two fields that you can enter descriptions for. I hear you have a short description and here you have a long description in our experience, Josie and mine probably both. There are more people who enter a short description than who enter a long description, but the directory displays the long description and not the short description. The reason why more people fill in the short description is because when you visit the books homepage. It's the short description that displays here. The long description would show up here if it was entered. The, the issue that we're having with the directory is in the press books directory. The description field. Let me show one that has a good description here. This description field. This description field will show you the long description for a book. There's nothing in the book card that shows the short description so there's a little bit of a miss mismatch of expectations or of practice there. The part of the process is just informing people that the description field in the directory is populated from the long description field. Whereas the description that displays in the most prominent place on a book homepage is populated from the short description field and we still have some probably work in coordination to do with that. Okay, so that concludes the press books demo portion. Thank you for coming to the demonstration and product update. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to turn the recording off and this is going to be a chance for any of you to share projects that you're working on or things that you're excited about. And that might be of interest to others.