 Hi, everybody. Welcome to the January Pressbooks product update. I'm Steel Wagstaff, the product manager from Pressbooks, and I want to start by kind of talking through some of the things that we've released since the last time we all met together. The first thing that we wanted to share and show, I guess, is we've made a change that's kind of a smaller change, but it's a change that improves the login experience for people who have Pressbooks accounts but don't yet have books. So in the case that you've been added to your Pressbooks network but don't have a role in a book, now when you log in there will still be an admin link in the main dashboard. When you click the admin link, it will just take you to the basically empty Pressbooks dashboard that shows your user account and will invite you to create a new book or to take some other action. So it's a bit more of like a graceful fallback experience where the user doesn't have an account or has an account but doesn't have books. So I can't, I'm not going to really show that but just know that that will happen. We could demo later if you really want to see it. Another change we made has been a long time coming. It took us a little bit longer than we hoped to get it shipped but it's a language change primarily doesn't change functionality but it's an important one. There's a couple places in the Pressbooks interface where we previously had used the term whitelist and we changed that to say allow list. We don't want to use the language that could have potentially racially coded connotations. So if you look at the network settings you'll see there's an iframe allow list. Anyway, any place that we refer to it under documentation we're going to be calling it an allow list. You can see that it's using allow list here. The functionality is the same. It's just the name change. The other place that that occurred was in the if you're using the old LTI 1.1 plugin. There's an LTI registration allow list and you can see that the term is allow list throughout. So not a functionality change but an important language change. If there are other things like that that you notice throughout the Pressbooks interface that you think should be changed please let us know and we'd like to make sure that the software in the interface is more inclusive and better representative of the values that community holds. So those are some changes that we made there. Another thing that we did was we fixed a bug that a few of you had reported to us. So if you go to, so here's an example. If I'm on an individual book on a Pressbooks network and I click sign in from the book. I'll come to a sign in page and previously, if you had clicked the loss your password link from the book sign in page, it would have taken you to a page not found error. Now when you click it, it takes you to the last password page that was expected. It had always worked if you had come to the network home and click sign in and reset your password that always worked. But there was briefly a bug where if you had gone from a book homepage and tried to sign in, it gave you a page not found error and that was confusing for some people. That's now been fixed and so you can reset your password from a book login page as well. Another change that we made that some of you will have noticed is for a while, some of you had noticed that your catalogs weren't working properly like so if you came into your book catalog, and you filtered by subject, the particular subject headings you're supposed to be able to filter by them, and that had been broken for some of your networks. So we made a change and it was, it had to do with how the book info was being stored, and we fixed that change. Something to know however is that if you clone books between September 30th and January 20th. They might have bad subject headings in book info. So I can show you kind of what you could look for there. I'm going to come to the integrations network, I'll find a book that was created between those dates. It's ready ahead of time. Okay, so I'll come in and I'll find a book, book list. Let's look at one that was created between those dates that I think is a clone. Okay, for example, this book here was cloned in January. So when I go and visit this particular book dashboard, and I look at book info. I suspect that what I'm going to see is this primary subject field may be broken or might not be working properly. So you can reset it and you can set it back to history. Let's say it's history of art. You may also notice that the additional subjects are broken. In some cases it's broken but it's like invisible which one that's broken so you just have to add an extra one so you might say like Canadian. Let's say Canary Islands and then you would see one that could be removed when you save it. Hopefully it will save correctly. Occasionally it will show you like an error message. Come back to the page and save it again and it will save this updated subject heading. That demonstration wasn't perfect and it wasn't great, but you may run into that issue where you see that the subject heading was corrupted because it was cloned while that bug was in place. We're going to see if there's a way that we can kind of fix that automatically for people but in the meantime, that's something to keep an eye out for. It should only affect books that were cloned basically October, November, December. But that's something that we're aware of and we're looking at the problem there. So I see there's a question in the chat regarding the first update. If the user has been added to a book but hasn't gotten an invite email to that book. It will show up for them in a new way when they log in now. Laura, I don't think so, but I'm not sure I understand the use case. Usually if they've, if they've been invited to join a book there's an action they need to take via email, and then add it to the book. You can you can skip that though still. Yeah, so you can force add them. If they're forced added, it'll just show up in their, in their catalog when they, when they're entered, when they're added. Nothing's different about the dashboard. So if a user has been added to the, okay, let me try to step back. My understanding is, if a user has been added to the press books network, they have a user account that's created. They have been invited to a book but have not accepted the invitation. Nothing will be different about the press books dashboard. When they log in, they'll still have a pending invitation out there that they'll need to accept the email there's not a prompt on the dashboard that shows them an outstanding invitation. So that's a really interesting feature idea. Maybe we could work with you on that. Okay, so that was what I want to talk about with the subject headings. The other things I don't really have much to show, but we made a number of changes and improvements to the LTI provider and especially the LTI 1.3 provider tool. The LTI 1.3 provider tool is the thing that we're using for that results for LMS feature. So we were doing a pilot with a couple of instructors and they gave us some feedback. So we've just been making enhancements and improvements to make the grade pass back part work better. The big thing to announce there though is that can the canvas LMS has improved their handling for thin common cartridges using the LTI 1.3 connection. So what's really nice about that is now you there's a seamless upgrade path. If you've been previously using LTI 1.1 and would like to move to the LTI 1.3 or turn on the grade reporting feature. The canvas upgrade path is seamless and smooth and works much better. So the LTI links previously weren't working with canvas canvas has pushed some code over the winter that now makes it work. So those of you that are using canvas and the LTI you can now use 1.3 really well with canvas and it's kind of working as we hoped and expected it would. That wasn't a press exchange but we did work with canvas to improve that performance. So we also some of you are institutions that use the plugin for multilateral SSO. This is only going to be relevant if you're a consortium but since Rama and Lillian are on the call at the campus Ontario this is something that we've spent a lot of time working on with you. Thanks for your patience. We made a bunch of improvements to how we handle this multilateral SSO. So many institutions want to log into one press books network with their individual single sign on accounts that works a lot better and we've added a feature that logs those attempts so I can show you I guess let me go to a network that has this and I'll show you in the back end kind of what it looks like. This is helpful for us mainly in debugging. You won't likely see it much on your side but let me actually turn the plug in on first and then I'll show you. So give me a second. I haven't shared my screen yet. I don't think so let me share my screen here. What you would see is okay. This is what press book sees so we have an allow list for the different domains that get allowed, and we also are now logging log in attempts so this is helpful for us when when an institution is first setting up their identity provider. We want to make sure that the claims that we're getting are what we expect and we can debug them. So now we can just generate a CSV file and it will show all of the login attempts with the attribute information. It makes it a lot easier for you and us to set up and work those configurations out. We went from taking a couple of weeks free school to kind of get it figured out when we first started be campus, and now we can pretty much do it in a day or less. And Rama has been a saint very patient on that. Thank you Rama you've been awesome. So that was a change for OIDC if you're doing multi letter SSO we're pretty confident and we feel really good about how that's working now. Just a note if you're an open source press books user I'm not sure how many of you are on the call but just in case two changes that are pretty important one is the latest release of press books requires you to run PHP 7.3 on your server or later, and we're also requiring WordPress 5.5.3 or later because that's in the release notes but just know you might need to upgrade your server or the version of PHP running on your server. And the second note is that we built an optional integration with an application monitoring tool called Sentry. What Sentry does is it allows any time a user experiences a bug or an error in the front end or in the back end, it will lock you can direct it to send those errors to a century monitoring application. We're doing that for the press books networks that we host just so that we can catch bugs faster and fix them faster. If you're hosting your own version of press books, you can set up something similar and we've added documentation for how to do it in the latest release notes. That's pretty kind of developer technical so I don't imagine there's a ton of questions from this general group but if there are I'm happy to take them. Those are the kind of press books and press books app related features that I wanted to share. I'll pause briefly and take any questions about those or other things before I jump into the directory part of the meeting. Okay, no question so the next thing I want to show is the biggest thing that we spent the most amount of time working on since we talked last has been the press books directory so that was our latest thing we released the press books director really excited. The last thing that we want to show is if you go to press books directory you'll see a couple of changes that we've made. One of them is that we're now linking to our guide for how to use the directory. So we've written a really detailed guide chapter that explains a lot of the things that I explained verbally in our last meeting. Sorry, give me a second. I'm sharing my screen is okay good. So here you'll see in our guide we have a chapter that explains. Here's what the directory looks like. Here's how you can use the search bar. So there's some kind of detailed stuff about using the search bar. The search bar exists right here and you can search all of book metadata in the directory using that search bar. So there's some explanations for the search bar and some of the parameters and queries. If you want to really dig in for some of your Boolean operators and other kind of librarian type things. We have some instructions for the search bar. The other thing to know is that once you perform a search. So if I were to search film. You'll notice that we're seeing 41 of the 2000 results. The first one is that great Berkeley book about love narratives and East Asian literature and film. And you also now have a search query that you can save and share and send to other people this will return the live results of that query anytime. The second thing that we're going to explain to you how to do is how to use the filters. So you'll notice that we made a bunch of changes to the filters we've reordered them so that the most important filters we think will appear at the top. These filters can be expanded and you can apply filters. So for example, I might want to say I want to exclude any book that is all rights reserved I only want to see CC license books. So this is the exclude option. Now this list is showing me all of the books in the directory that have only CC licenses and that have the word film in the title. So I can now see that these refinements have been applied. My search query has changed so this you all return different results. I could remove the word film from my search and research, and now it's going to search everything but without the all rights reserved books. I can then combine filters so I could say I also want to search by subject. I only want books that don't have a subject applied. And I want to look at books from a given network and I could start applying these filters together. I can make pretty complex facets and filters. And this at the top will show me all of the active filters that are applied. I can remove them one at a time or all at a time by clicking the clear refinements. As I apply those facets and filters. This URL is changing. And that URL is just remembering all of the parameters that I've applied for my facets and filtering. It will kind of operate a lot like the subject catalogs or the, you know, you have those academic search databases that have a lot of that fascinating filtering. The prospects directory now supports a lot of those things. There is a clear filter button. So for example, if I only wanted to clear the network filter, I could click clear filter. And that would apply all of the network filters that I applied but leave other filters that I have put in place. One thing that you may want to do is you may want to look and see, okay, what I only want to see the books that are showing up from my press books network. The easiest way to do that is to come under the network tab and say, okay, what's the name of my so Amy in the chat asked this question so I might start looking for open Oregon. I say, okay, cool. Open Oregon has 61 books in the directory. If I apply this filter here I'm getting I'm able to see all of the open Oregon books that are the directory is including and I can look through these and say, are these the books that I actually want to show up. Maybe at some point I say, oh, you know what beginning Excel wait a minute that's a that book shouldn't be in the directory we want to remove that. And so I could go visit beginning Excel. If I wanted to I could come in and I could say for the individual book come to settings sharing and privacy. And I could say actually yeah let's remove that book from the directory for right now and I could change that setting. So that's a tool that's available to his network managers to kind of quickly take a look at what's in the directory for you. If you remove a book from the directory using that sharing and privacy setting that will happen instantaneously the book will be taken out of the directory right away. If you change your mind and put it back in the directory. It will happen we re-index those things every hour on the hour so it won't come back into the directory until the next time we run our sync, which is every hour on the hour. So that's a little bit about what you can do to kind of drill down and look at see what what books are available for you. A couple other features you may want to know about is that you can change the number of books per page so in the case of 60 books I could show 50 at a time. And you can also change the sort order right now it's alphabetical, but you could sort it by when a book was updated or by word count also. The last but not least that really exciting thing is several of you on this call represents some of the open source press books network so when we first released the press with directory. We were only including books from networks that we hosted, but in the last month, we've added I think six or seven of the really prominent open source networks who've worked with us so we're really pleased that the BC campus books are now Josie thanks for working on it. You can now see all of BC campuses books they have hundreds of really great books including a huge chunk of the open stacks books that they've worked really hard to bring in remediate. So those are now included in the directory. If you were to look for Alberta so Michelle's network. We've got all of Alberta's books that they've included the list and they have some really terrific books on an open source hosted network. And then a lot of you know Billy Mankey at Hawaii. So we've also added Hawaii's books here. And you can see here's some of the really cool books that Hawaii is brought in. And I know there's a few other open source networks that we've added that I'm forgetting right now. So thank you for working with us on those. And we're really excited to see that this number is over 2000 and growing. So hopefully you'll find the directory really useful and valuable for you. The other thing that I want to show is two things that we're working on that will be released pretty soon. Let me close this and go to our Devon. So one is we're going to be adding a kind of featured books ultimately I think this will be featured collections. So above the fold you'll have the ability to see some featured collections. And if you were to click a collection it would aggregate a bunch of books on a certain topic so we're going to build a collection that's all about open education or we'll build a collection that's about accessibility and inclusivity. We'll build a collection that's about interactive OER books that have a lot of H5P and that have been really well built. We could build an open stacks collection or we just have the ability to kind of aggregate books by collections. So that will be coming soon and will be a new facet and filter. The other thing that we're starting to do is we're going to be adding these little recommended tags or filters. We haven't yet sent an email out to everybody but the idea would be that if books meet certain criteria that we will recommend them and add this little recommended tag. It basically means that the book has good metadata and we think it's a complete book that might be broadly useful. We're going to have really kind of, I think, pretty loose criteria for what gets put in as recommended. But that will be a new feature that's coming in the directory. This recommended and then some featured books and featured collections. Those will be probably arriving in the next month or two, I think. And we also are going to be doing a big kind of facelift and beautifying and redesigning the press books directory along with the relaunch of our marketing website. We'll have a new look and feel but the functionality will be pretty much preserving that the same. Okay, so that's what I wanted to show for the directory. I'll pause there and take questions. I see some stuff in the chat. If anybody wants to unmute and ask stuff. I'm happy to take questions about what's happened with the directory what is happening with the directory. And that isn't really about the directory but was kind of inspired by the directory and I don't think I've brought it up here and I may have missed a meeting or two so it may have come up as well and another one but is there any kind of we are guidelines around the publisher tag and metadata like what I discovered and looking through the directory is a lot of cloned books, maintain the original publisher. And that's part of the metadata and is that really applicable, I guess is the big like philosophical question, is it the same book, because we have a really popular book that I think has four or five clones now on the, that are all in the directory and some of them show up as published by Ohio State some don't. And I wonder if there's any kind of guideline that can be put in place to either like stop that from being transmitted to clone books or enforce it if that's what the community wants like I really don't know what like the we are philosophical stance on this is and it's a question that just was, we talked about it in the unison meeting a few times but I don't think we've brought it up here it's come up here. That's a great I haven't heard it discussed before but I can so to summarize what I think I'm understanding is, you've made a book, and your institution is the publisher that book but that book has an open license. Your institution to clones this book, and it's now published on their press books network, but it still lists your institution as the publisher. Correct. Let's say they make substantial revisions they ought to probably change the publisher of that, but the default value is just whatever the value of the publisher that was set when it was cloned. There's a couple things I think that we could do here one would be. We circulate some best practices and strongly encourage people to follow them and hope that they do. The other option is what we did recently was when we clone books we no longer clone the ISBN, for example, because the ISBN needs to be unique. We could choose if we if people felt strongly like we could say when you clone a book don't clone the publisher field. So a clone book would have an empty publisher and need to be supplied. I think if that was a problem for enough people that they felt like hey we don't want to be listed as the publisher of derivatives, then that would be an easy enough change for us to make in our cloning routine. However, it wouldn't address books that have already been cloned with that metadata. I guess I'm open to other people have thoughts or ideas or feedback about that. What's the general consensus about what we ought to do. Yeah, I think for BC campus it would make sense for the publisher to not come through on cloned books. Like I know when we do adaptations, we become the publisher. So that's kind of been always been our practice manually change that right you change that value before. Yeah, but most of our adaptations haven't been through press books it's been stuff we've brought into press books but yeah I do know there's lots of books in there where BC campus is the publisher but they're not in our instances anymore other people have taken and made the copies their own. Would anyone have strong objections if we removed, if we stopped cloning the publisher information for derivative books with that cause problems or you see any issues that might emerge from doing that. We'll say I think that that just assumes that every time you clone a book it's with the intention of creating a derivative work but I know that lots of folks are like cloning over to their network to just have a specific link for their students or to have, you know, the API integration work. And I wonder if that would affect people who are using the clone feature, just simply to have local copies to distribute. I don't, I wouldn't know, I assume it's not teaching but I imagine more than more than just creating derivative works it's that would be a reason to clone a book. What I want to be thinking about is making sure that the attribution is still provided through other mechanisms so we don't want we certainly want to. The clone book should always give credit to the original and point to the attribution but whether it indicates the same publisher of the clone book by default is a separate question and after bringing that up Mike I can turn that into a featured question we can discuss that with a few more, a few more people in the precipice world before we do something about that. Yeah cool like I said like, I don't feel super strongly one way or the other about as I, it's just a thing like I'm not even sure what the community thinks like it's just something I noticed when looking through the directory and just jumped out as a little odd. I've seen the same thing you know there's that guide to making open textbooks with students that's cloned on the like 300 networks and they all show Rebus as the publisher and Rebus may love that Rebus may not love that I don't know a person may want to weigh in on that. I agree with you steal for us all the books that are published on our network, something that we hold really dearly is that the creators hold copyright to those books. So in some cases Rebus is the official publisher supplying the ISPN in other cases they're published out of another institution but using the Rebus network. So for us, I think what in favor of not having that piece of data copied over during clones but I like Jonathan suggestion in the chat, which you could retain a statement that says original publisher for this clone version was X and that solves the attribution piece and also I guess Lillian's comment about instructors who might be using the books as is for teaching. Interesting yeah. What's going to what's going to happen in many cases is that that's fine. I think there's going to be some weird metadata there where you're going to have a metadata entry that shows the publisher as this strange string which is not in fact a actual publisher entity, but issues with exports so that's something to consider that. It would appear on your publisher page as this weird name of a publisher. Yeah. Okay, so there's something to think about there. And that's a good point, probably mentioning that in the workflow when you're adapting a clone book would be a good idea for us to provide for people certain at the very minimum, and maybe removing the publisher information upon clone or not cloning that as part of the book info. This was from, maybe not a question or a statement but Amy and Lauren both said, I had questions about checklists for people so. Amy, the question is like, how do I make sure how do I know my book is going to look good or look right have all the right information for the book directory if I'm summarizing is that kind of the question. Yeah, we did. My program assistant and I did a pass through all the metadata on all the books in the network over the summer. But we weren't focusing on the things that would make the book show up in the directory how we want them like that radio button that you showed the on off in the directory. Like, subject headings and like what other things are there to look out for and just kind of like a checklist would help us go through all the books in the network in a more systematic way. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so our plan for this is so we have a press books we just brought on a practicum student from McGill from the library program, and he's specifically I'm mentoring him and we're working on UX and user experience for the directory itself. And one of the big goals is he's working to help us develop this recommended books feature. And what we're drafting right now is some language for all network managers right now which will say, hey everyone we'd like to bring we're going to start doing this is recommended feature in order for your book to be recommended. Here are the things that you should, it's going to be a checklist of metadata that we'd like to have in place or to have considered. Once that has been done, then a book is eligible to be a recommended book. So we will be providing that via email, hopefully in the next month that's his like next project to be working on. And, and then we can publish that and you can share that and kind of circulate it'll be, we'll try to keep it brief and try to keep it doable, but it will be like book info metadata suggestions to make a book. It's the most findable in the directory. So that's exactly what we have in mind and I'm glad that that would be helpful for you or hope it will be helpful for you. Do you fear, do you fear that, like a year, two years down the road, 80% of them will end up being recommended. No, I think that'd be great. That's the goal that's the point. And ultimately, like this is a light recommendation, you know, like, depending on what you're looking for some people are not looking for a finished book, some people are looking for like, I want something that I can quickly revise and remix and anything is better than nothing or maybe you want to make a Frankenstein book and so you're looking for parts of something to cannibalize we we can't know what a user is intention is when they come to the directory. We can make, we can, for recommendations, we can say at least we know that these books meet some kind of basic metadata criteria. We're not, we don't need to be a gatekeeper as to the content quality or the expertise in the book that's for others to decide, but certainly in terms of like a metadata threshold, we can say, yeah, this book has met some kind of basic standards, and now users can make their own decisions about whether they'd like to use adopt or otherwise modify it. I think that's our kind of our company's intention. Yeah, Jonathan, if we can make that. Yeah, it's a it's a semantic nomenclature issue. Take it up with our comms marketing people Jonathan if you want to make the argument for well meta decorated I'm not sure that that's going to be the term of art that's chosen. Anybody else have questions about the directory or things that we saw in the product update today. There isn't so much a question but sort of related. I just put in the chat that I get UW we, I, when I'm talking with a faculty member and I know that they're creating a book and press books and I know that it's going to be an OER or very close or an open strategy project that might not be fully OER but meet certain criteria then under my discretion we added to our featured titles catalog which is like the press books catalog on our homepage and then we also get those catalogs in our ebris libraries catalog. And so I'm kind of curious what, like how that will end up intersecting with the recommended titles for the directory. Similarly, or sort of related. I'm working on a template chapter right now I've been working with a lot of classes where students are authoring books and press books and I wonder if anybody else is doing this where you have a sort of template chapter with media attributions and citations and sort of the formatting that you might want students to do for a chapter. And to keep consistency in the book. So I'm sort of working on that to give to students who are authoring chapters and press books, along with like a checklist, or maybe like a templated thing for faculty to fill out the book info page just to make it like very easy for them to have consistency and pretty. So those are all great ideas what what we're hoping to do with this US practice us practicum student is, I'd like him to do like a survey or focus group with some of the library and users to say like, what should we improve about book info and these exact kinds of questions. I think that many of you will probably send you an invitation to join his survey group or hopefully contribute a little bit of time, or filling out a survey to help us understand your needs and uses a bit better. One thing that we are doing that's sort of imperceptible but we have thought about this so with your question Lauren about indicating in the directory whether a book was in its networks catalog or not. And actually we were doing it with color, and we were doing a bit bolder but if you look here, it's very very faint, but this book has a plain white card background, and this one has a light, very light blue. That's indicating actually whether the book is in the, that it's networks catalog or is not. The other thing is that every network has different practices for what they put in their catalog and what they don't. Some don't even use the catalog feature at all and some use it religiously. So, the question for us is, because the signal isn't universal making a universal decision and our director design wasn't super helpful. The other thing that we were thinking about doing is what I would like is, right now we have a visual indicator that shows you the copyright license like this means all rights reserved. This is a book from Lauren from your network that cannot be cloned, because it's already reserved, but it's still a useful book it could be taught with it could be adopted, it just couldn't be revised and remixed. So if you have a little like you maybe have some kind of symbol with color maybe it's a border that's read that shows you quickly visually, not eligible for cloning. Again, those, those signs don't have intrinsic meaning so we would need to decide what the right indicator is, which indicators should be included and then provide some kind of code or key for interpreting them. The next thing that we're planning to do is to build like a, it's called a product tour, and it's basically just an optional overlay that says take a tour and what it will be is it'll be like a little focus on the search bar and we'll explain how the search bar works. And then we'll focus on the license bar and shows how that works and then it focuses on the book card and kind of interprets the book card for users. So the next kind of thing we're hoping to build just to make the directory a bit more user friendly and explain some of the more complex features for people who may not be accustomed to search tools like this. And in the course of doing that of course we'll need feedback from you and others about what worked and what didn't. So again, yeah, we have a bunch of UX things we'd like to do and slowly chipping away and maybe next month we'll have more show on that front. I left it a little bit tight, but usually we try to have a little roundtable where others of you share things that you're working on questions that you have accomplishments that you're proud of. I'm going to turn the recording off and let us do that roundtable if anybody has something they'd like to share. Go for it.