 Welcome everybody, I'm Steele Wagstaff. This is the August press books product meeting. We'll cover some new features that we've released that you may want to know about. We'll give you an update on some of our big development projects, especially the press books directory, which is nearing completion. And we'll talk about a couple of things that network managers can do to get their network books ready for public display when the directory goes live. We'll give a little bit of an update on what's been happening with the LTI advantage or results for LMS, as we call it. And we'll leave some time at the end for community roundtable for any of you to share, news, projects, other things of interest for the rest of the user community. So thanks everyone for being here. And I will start by just sharing a couple of things that we have done recently at press books that may be of interest for you. One of them was, I can't really demo it very well, but if you're using our LTI provider plugin, whether it's 1.1 or 1.3, we have made a change to how the user roles get assigned. So I'll give you an example of a press book network and show you what the setting looks like. Press book settings are set. You'll see globally, at the network level, you can decide based on the LMS role, what role a user gets mapped to. So if I'm an LMS administrator and I launch a press book about the LTI, I would have the role of whatever press books role I wanna give them. If I'm a staff member, meaning a faculty or instructor or TA, what role would I get upon LTI launch? And then a learner, what role do they get? Usually the defaults are all just set to subscriber and that's the global defaults. But at the book level, you can change it. So if you are a professor and you are teaching a course and you have an LTI link to a press book and you want students to be provisioned with say the author role in the book or the editor role, because you're collaboratively writing a book for your class, you can do that using the LTI settings. We had had a problem previously where if a user was created for the first time upon LTI launch, it was always automatically making them a subscriber. It wasn't respecting the settings. So we fixed and changed and deployed that. So now whatever settings you set at the book level, they'll be respected whether the user already has an account or whether the user is newly created. So you can use this feature with confidence, knowing that the role provisioning will happen as intended. So that was a recent fix that's been pushed and deployed to all production networks. If you're using the old LTI or the new LTI tool, you should see the same or similar behavior there. So the next thing that we were doing was we've added for all links in a book in the XHTML. So the XHTML that's used to make the PDF, we added an additional attribute to all of those links which includes the full path of the URL. That attribute is called data URL. And the way that you can use it is in your custom CSS, for example, PDF, you can decide like for example, in the print book after a link using the pseudo element after, print out the content of this data URL attribute. So here was a specific example where the book that Aparva was just showing you, they wanted to be able to display the actual link references in the print book after every link. So they added a little bit of custom CSS to their PDF print export. And then you see the resulting PDF will say, this book has, so this is a link right here. And here's the printed value of the link displayed in the book. The same thing would happen in the footnotes. So that's available and it can be targeted and used with CSS. It just helps if you want to print your, the full path of URLs in the print book and Aparva and the folks that read this have been the people who requested it and I made the first use of it. So that's now available there in press books. And we also made a couple of changes and improved the performance of a third party plugin called Lord of the Files. This is mainly used by network managers, but by defaults we have a pretty strict allow list and block list for what kinds of files can be uploaded to press books. Press books isn't meant to be a file server, but it can handle some media files. And Lord of the Files also lets you sanitize and check file uploads to make sure that they are what they say they are. If you wanted to use it at the network level, if you're a network manager, but it'll be network activated if you host with us. So here in this particular case, you'll see tools, debug file validation. If you're an administrator network manager, you'll be able to upload a test file and debug it and see, is this file allowed to be uploaded? Is it what it says it is? So for example, I'm gonna pick a PNG. I'm gonna upload it and it's gonna tell me, okay, we validated this file, this was a screenshot of PNG, it says it was a PNG, it actually is a PNG, we tested it and it tells me you should be able to upload this file. If it's not working, you've got a problem. So sometimes you may wanna upload a file or a file type and test whether it's permitted or allowed. If I were to try to upload a SVG, for example, that would need some stricter validation. This also means that there are additional file type extensions if you need to be able to upload specific file types for a book. So we recently worked with someone who is uploading some sheet music files created by an open source musical notation program. They wanted to be able to allow those type of files on their networks. Network managers can email Pressbooks premium support and we can add certain file types to your allow list and this tool, Lord of the Files, will help validate and test them. We are also working on a couple of pretty exciting things that haven't been released but will be released soon. I'll give you a sneak preview of them. In Pressbooks, we have had for a long time or for a little while a cool feature called shape shifter that's available in Malala. So if you go into your theme and you apply the Malala theme and you come to theme options, you'll see that this shape shifter feature allows you to select a different typeface for all of your headers so you can choose any one of these many typefaces for the header and a different typeface for the body font. You can do that for the web book. You can also do it separately for the PDF and for the ebook so you can really choose your preferred type font pairings with Malala. It really lets you kind of modify and customize this theme. Up until now, Malala has been the only theme this is available for. We've added a couple of new typefaces to this list. One of them you'll notice is source sans pro was relatively recent. I can't remember who requested it but they may be on this call. We also have recently added sorts milgoody which is a serif font that some people like to look of and that was somebody in Oregon who requested that. And we're adding a new font called new Athena Unicode. This is developed by a classics organization and it has really good support for a bunch of ancient Greek, Coptic, a bunch of ancient languages. So if you're working in a project that has non-traditional scripts and don't wanna declare them in a different way, you can choose to display this new Athena Unicode and that was something that UC Berkeley had requested. They have a huge Greek manuscript and really wanted to be able to use this typeface as an open license so we were able to add that. That will be coming soon. The other kind of exciting thing is that previously Shapeshifter was only available in Malala but people liked the feature and wanted to be able to use it elsewhere. So we have turned it on and we'll be turning it on soon for McLuhan which is the main core press books theme. In the near future, when you use McLuhan you will also see these font selector options for McLuhan. We're considering doing it for other themes as well. If this is important for you, you like the feature and wanna be able to use it in your favorite theme you can let us know and we'll make the decision to start releasing this and other themes as needed or as requested. But that's a little bit about what's coming soon for theme options. Another pretty important change for a small group of users is you can see that we provide language and script support. So this feature is pretty cool because it allows you to declare support for any number of languages which have different alphabets or different scripts. When you select the language we will download the typeface that's needed to display those characters and make sure that it's used as the fallback. Up until now it's previously been other language sets. So we recently added a couple of Western African alphabets, Adlem and Niko. But one of the new ones that's brand new to us is called musical notation. So in, if you're writing music there's a whole bunch of Unicode characters which are not typically represented in many conventional typefaces. We have learned from our friends at SUNY that there is an open source, a really nice open source musical notation font called bravura text. It's used for musical notation and it's using this standard music font layout and it's an openly licensed font. And so now if you want to have bravura text supported in your books and have the fallback for those Unicode characters you would simply need to add musical notation in the language and script support. And then those Unicode characters will have a fallback that's represented in your web book and all of your exports. So that should be cool. I don't know that much about musical notation so I can't really demonstrate it professionally but I know that there are people and users that are really excited about this feature and we're hoping to include it on our next release on Wednesday. So that's a little bit about what's coming with some additional typeface and language support. It's really fun learning about the many different ways people represent language and other symbols and it's been a growth experience for me personally so I've enjoyed working on that and hopefully this will help meet the needs of more of our users who want to publish more diverse kinds of content. Rahma, I'm glad that you appreciate Niko. I just learned about it myself and the AdLamb as well, it's pretty exciting. It's actually my dialect and I am surprised that it's actually there. So they've made a long progress to get it there. That's pretty impressive that Pressbook now has that. Like I can't wait to share that information with some linguists as I know. Terrific, yeah, we have a, Hugh has a friend, Florence who runs the Science and the Communes Pressbooks Network and they're doing a lot of work publishing Francophone African literature and just literature in any African language is trying to, I think she calls it epistemic justice or something. That's the term for it, so. Nice. Yeah. So great, yeah, we'd love to see more books in Niko, Rahma, even if I can't read them. And was that just a surprise, Rahma, that we've added that? Yeah, it was a surprise, but I think it's also, I know that it's sort of been like in the development for a while. So it was actually surprising to see because it's not often that I feed or even know it about or like many people know about it. So I definitely have to do a little bit more research on the development of Niko and how it's progression since the last time I've learned about the actual written form version of it. Because I come from a Francophone country and that is my third dialect but I learned French instead of that. Because we didn't really have the written system set up for school yet, very impressive. That's super cool that you're on the call while it feels and helps in that. Yeah, fun, be happy. Me too. I'm glad to have a user who's able to appreciate it because sometimes you do these things and you don't know who it's gonna affect. So thanks Rahma. If you visit staging.pressbooks.directory you'll see a work in progress. We're gonna be working on cleaning this up and improving it but you'll see the directories here the search filter, the search feature is still available. We've added a couple of refinements here to the filters. So you can now notice that you can choose to include any filter or you can also choose to exclude a filter. So Amy had asked about this a while back she's not on the call anymore but suppose I don't wanna see any all rights reserve books I can choose to exclude that filter and it will show me all of the books which have any one of these open licenses. But it's a quicker way to get to what you're looking at there. The filtering behavior is both included exclude now for all of the binary filters that appear in the directory. Another thing that we've done is we've added the ability to change the number of books you display per page whether it's 10, 20 or 50. And we've also given you a couple of sort options this was requested. So the default sorting will be alphabetical title A to Z but you can also choose to sort by word count and by how recently a book was updated. Not all of the books have this metadata in the directory yet so we're gonna be improving it and making sure that the book cards have that information but those are a couple of new sorting features. We also have added the pagination at the top as well as the bottom. So there's a couple of places that you could look for pagination to move through results. You'll look at the book cards and when they have very long descriptions we're also gonna truncate the descriptions after six lines so that they don't make the cards keep flowing and look super enormous. And we're gradually cleaning up and refining the directory. One of the big changes that people had requested was to have more granular control about whether a public book appears in the public directory or not. We heard that, that was really important to us and so you'll notice now in press books if you go to an individual book, so here's a sample book and I will pick a book that's public. I have a public book, typically this book because it's public would appear in the directory but now every public book if you go to settings, sharing and privacy you'll see an option whether you want the book to be listed in the directory or not. So the default value would be yes, public books are in the public directory but you can toggle it and say no exclude this book from the directory so you can choose to opt in or opt out from the directory for public books. Private books will never be included no matter what but this is a toggle that you can turn on or off for the public books in your directory. We will be working this sprint to make sure that the directory applies that behavior so even though you can choose the setting now the behavior won't be applied immediately but we will be applying it quite soon and it will definitely be in place before we release the full public directory. I know that was a feature that was requested so that individual authors could have a public book that's still a work in progress. They don't want to list it in the directory yet they can choose at any point to change that setting and the setting should be instantaneous or close to instantaneous once it's finished. The other option is for network managers. So at the network manager level you will see under network options at the very bottom here, book directory option a network manager can choose to exclude any non cataloged public books from their directory. The network managers of course if you remember you have the ability to decide which of your books are in your catalog or not. So if you're using the catalog and you have a bunch of books in your catalog you can say I only want the books that are in my catalog to show up in the directory. That's a little bit more of a drastic step and it does remove agency from authors because generally you're the only person who decides what goes in the catalog or not. We would recommend in most cases that you not do that unless you're really sure that's what you want to do but some of you have networks where that makes sense where you're very tightly controlling the publication process and you only want your catalog books to be in the directory. So that's an option or a feature that's available there. So JR, if that setting is chosen then only catalog books will appear in the directory. I think in fact if I'm not mistaken if I choose to exclude the non-catalog public books I believe that we take the choice away even from the, yeah. If you've chosen that at the network level the individual book authors don't even see that setting because it's irrelevant to them at that point. So that's how that works. If the global setting is on the setting is not available at the book level but if we go back to the global setting here and we were to say, oh, we want to give individual authors the choice then the individual authors will then see at the book level under settings, sharing and privacy they'll see their toggle to be able to choose whether or not they want to in the directory. So those are the two new things that are coming. Obviously you can start to make those adjustments and those changes now as you like but you won't see the changes appearing instantly in the staging directory quite yet. That will be coming, we're working on this sprint it's one of our goals. So that'll probably be there by mid September and we'll give you an all update. You can also expect if you're a network manager on a hosted press books network you can expect an email from me in the near future explaining all of this in more detail and giving you some options and making some recommendations to help get your metadata ready for public view. So that's a little bit about the directory that's what I wanted to show. There's probably a few more tweaks and features that I forgot about but just know that we're hard at work at that and our goal really, our major goal of our next sprint over the next two weeks is to get the directory cleaned up and ready for closer to ready for public release. Yes, so thank you, Lillian and Purva, Kathy there's a question about what the name of the open source musical notation typeface was it's called Bravura text. There's this organization called SMOOFL I don't know if I'm saying that right but the Bravura text was designed by Daniel Spreadbury who seems to be a big person in open musical notation. That's great, thank you for showing that. So that's SMOOFL.org.Fonts you can read more about Bravura. Steve, I have a question about the display order of cloned books. So I know one thing that struck me when I was testing on the directory was that are a lot of copies of the same book on different networks. So is that a way you can sort maybe by the original book and then list all of the other cloned copies to follow? Yeah, that was something that we did make a change behind the scenes of Purva so we can control the default display order and what I did was it's alphabetical and then in a tiebreaker it will be original book before clones now. That was a setting that had not been in place when you asked about it privately a couple weeks ago. So we now turn that on so it should be whenever there's a tie an alphabetical name it will try to display the original before it's children. I mean, if you notice, I think the staging should be updated there. If we notice some kinks or some problems with that, let us know and we can keep working on that and tweaking that behind the scenes but we would prefer to display the original before the children. Another thing that you can do is if that's kind of feeling frustrating you can always try to use the is original is a clone filtered so you could weed out. I don't want any of the derivatives I only want books that are in their database as original. Hopefully that's working a little bit better and if you notice that it's not letting you know and we can take a closer look. Okay, so the next thing I wanna show is we have been updating our LTI plugin. We have a new product that allows you to use the newest standard of LTI and exchange grades and performance in a book between the press books with HIP activities and your learning management system. It's called outcomes for LMS or results for LMS and press books supports this LTI 1.3 standard. So it's an additional add-on that some networks are starting to purchase and starting to use for their courses to do a bit more of the courseware type thing. Many of you have seen demos of it some of you are installing it and using it. I just wanna let everybody know that if you are interested in using it or you've begun configuring it we've published in our network manager guide we're publishing documentation for how to configure it with your LMS. So there's instructions for how to configure with Canvas. This is for the LMS administrator so this is a little bit technical. There's instructions for Blackboard. There are instructions for Moodle and then there's a demo video with instructions for D2L. We're still working on Sakai. We have some things that we need to work out with the Sakai maintainers and then it shows you how you can allow grade reporting in individual books as a network manager if this plug-ins active on your network. So this would be a decision a network manager would make to either allow grade reporting in a book or to allow it globally. And then there's some instructions if you have this turned on how an instructor could turn a press books chapter into a graded activity. So it describes you add the HVIP activities. There's little screenshots and descriptions for how to get it ready as a graded activity and finally how you would add the graded activity to your LMS and make sure that the grades are being exchanged. So this documentation is there. It's the first cut of it. We've been working with people who are doing it in live production environments. And so there's a couple of things we're cleaning up and improving to make the documentation clearer but just wanted everyone to know that that's there and available if you are using that tool or product. So that's a little bit about what's happening in the LTI courseware kind of space. Okay. So the last 10 minutes as always this is community roundtable time. I'm gonna open up the floor to any of you if you have news or projects or things that you wanted to share that are related to press books or press development or just open publishing your campus. Time is yours. Love to hear from you. Rebus recently supported the publication of this collection called open at the margins. I just dropped a link to it in the chat. It's a wonderful collection of very informal works, blog posts, articles, lectures, talks by 43 different diverse authors edited by a fantastic group of open education advocates. So that's something that we were really proud of earlier this month. And I hope that some of you will take some time to browse through and read. Hey, I can't remember if I mentioned this at our last meeting but we recently had a press books book that was co-created with students at UW in Rick Bonas's Critical Philopnex American Histories class featured on the open education network. And there's an article that I just shared talking about the book and how we worked with Professor Rick Bonas and students in his class on. Thanks Lauren. That looks like a really exciting project as well. I have a project that happened on our network and I'm not personally responsible for it or involved at all but I just think it's really cool. We have had some faculty members completely unfunded and unprompted and unsupported creating a medical terminology foundation text. And one of the things I think is really amazing about it is that every chapter has pronunciation flashcards on how to pronounce different anatomy and physiology terms. It's one of the biggest grassroots projects that has happened in Ontario across like six or seven institutions and I'll drop a link in the chat. I'm just super, super proud of these guys. They've worked really hard to make this happen despite people are just saying use a commercial textbook. We recently just released the electronic version of a music theory text. It is the text that Steele so kindly helped us and how we discovered River a text together from my faculty member who's really on the up and up for these sorts of things. So we just have the online press book version available right now and we'll be having the PDF later this month but it's really the author put so much work into it and it's really very detailed. Lots of multimedia resources in there. So yeah, hope people find it useful. Thanks Alison. I have a chance to look at this one a bit more closely than most of the books that get published and it blew my mind. It's just an incredible, I mean, it's huge and it's really, really an incredible impressive work by this person and it's so exciting to see that it's open and licensed. So well done to you and to Andre and everybody who worked on it. Tim, you wanna tell us about this enormous Scolia project that's going on at Berkeley? That one's kinda been blowing my mind a little bit too. Yeah, one of the professors here, Donald Vastrana, is doing, well, he's trying to archive a huge Greek Scolia project that he's been working on for years, I think. And that's what Silas mentioning, providing the additional font support for that in press books so that we can get it into various forms for people to look at, archive it, get it into our catalog, get it into the open textbook network. So he's been just plugging along and thanks to Steele and the press book support for helping like get this additional feature going. So we're excited about it. Yeah, this one's been pretty exciting. I mean, it's like a multi-thousand page Scolia edition of Euripides. So I mean, if you're interested in the ancient Greek drama, this is where it's at and it's something this faculty member seems to have been working on for decades and it's been a pretty quick transition in the press books which has been really gratifying and he looks like he's nearly finished with that and when it's published, I'm sure everyone will have a link to share, but it's a bit niche in its audience but very impressive in its scope. Elaine, if you're here, I know that this was going through the rounds recently but I don't think it was ever announced on this call. There is a very impressive film studies book that was published at the University of Arkansas. Do you wanna say anything about that or do you have anything you wanna share in the chat around that project? I hope I'm not stepping on any toes. I'll just share it with everyone. It's called Moving Pictures and Introduction to Cinema. It was a professor, Russell Sharman there and it's one of the most impressive like film studies things that I'd seen. It's all open and licensed and it's again, kind of like that Andre Mount project, largely one professor project with support, of course, from the libraries and the publishing books there and I will drop the link in the chat. I think it's pretty amazing. I came across my, you know, you look at those new books when they come out and this one, it was like an hour later and I was like realizing I was still reading it and still looking at it. I was like, I wanna take a quick look and it just definitely sucked me in. It was great. Okay, does anyone have any questions or product, things that they'd like to talk about? I can stop the recording now.