>>STEEL: Welcome everybody, I’m Steel Wagstaff,
this is the August Pressbooks 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 Pressbooks
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 Pressbooks
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 Pressbooks
network and show you what the setting looks
like.
Pressbooks 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 am an LMS administrator and I launch
a Pressbooks book via LTI, I would have the
role of whatever Pressbooks role I want to
give them.
If I am a staff member, meaning a faculty
or instructor or a 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 default.
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 Pressbook
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 will 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, in PDF, you can decide for example
in the print book, after a link, using the
pseudo element after to print out the content
of this data URL attribute.
So, here is a specific example where the book
that Apurva 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 is a link right here, and here is 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 the full
path of URLs in the print book.
And Apurva and the folks at Rebus have been
the people who requested it and have made
the first use of it.
So, that's now available there in Pressbooks.
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 default, we have a pretty strict allow
list and block list for what kinds of files
can be uploaded to Pressbooks.
Pressbooks 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 going to pick a PNG.
I'm going to upload it.
And it's going to 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 want to upload a file
or a file type and test whether it's permitted
or allowed.
If I were to try to upload an 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.
And 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
Shapeshifter, 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 Shapeshifter feature
allows you to select a different typeface
for all of your headers.
So, you can choose any of one of these many
typefaces for the header and a different typeface
for the body font.
You can do that for the webbook, 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 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
is relatively recent.
I can't remember who requested it, but they
may be on this call.
We also have recently added Sorts Mills Goudy,
which is a serif font that some people like
the look of.
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 ancient
Greek, Coptic, a bunch of ancient languages.
So, if you're working on a project that has
non-traditional scripts and don't want to
declare them 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.
It has 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 like the feature and wanted to
be able to use it elsewhere.
So, we have turned it on and will be turning
it on soon for McLuhan, which is the main
core Pressbooks 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 want to be able to use
it in your favorite theme, you can let us
know, and we'll make the decision to start
releasing this in 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, Adlam and N'Ko.
But one of the new ones that's brand-new to
us is called musical notation.
So, if you're writing music, there is 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 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 webbook
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 in 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.
Rama, I am glad that you appreciate N'Ko.
I just learned about it myself, and the Adlam
as well, it's pretty exciting.
>>RAMA: Yeah, that's actually my dialect,
and I am surprised that it's there.
So, they've made a long progress to get it
there.
That's pretty impressive that Pressbooks now
has that.
I can't wait to share that information with
some linguists I know.
>>STEEL: Terrific, yeah.
Hugh has a friend, Florence, who runs the
Science et Bien Commun Pressbooks network.
And they're doing a lot of work publishing
francophone African literature and just literature
in any African language.
I think she calls it epistemic justice or
something.
That's the term for it.
>>RAMA: Nice.
>>STEEL: Great, we'd love to see more books
in N'Ko, Rama, even if I can't read them.
>>HUGH: Was that just a surprise, Rama, that
we've added that?
>>RAMA: Yeah, it was a surprise, but also
I know that it's been in the development for
a while.
So, it's actually surprising to see it, because
it's not often that I see it or even know
it, or many people know about it.
So, I definitely have to do a little bit more
research on the development of N'Ko and its
progression since the last time I learned
about the actual written form version of it.
Because I come from a francophone country
and that is my first dialect, but I learned
French instead of that, because we didn't
really have the written system set up for
school yet.
Very impressive.
>>HUGH: That's super cool that you're on the
call while Steel's announcing that.
That makes me happy.
>>STEEL: Me too.
I'm glad to have a user who is able to appreciate
it, because sometimes you do these things
and you don't know who it's going to affect.
So, thanks, Rama.
If you visit staging.pressbooks.directory
you'll see a work in progress.
We're going to be working on cleaning this
up and improving it.
But you'll see the directory is here, 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, I think Amy had asked about this a while
back.
She's not on the call anymore but suppose
I don't want to see any all rights reserved
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.
So, it's a quicker way to get to what you're
looking at there, the filtering behavior is
both include and 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 going to be improving
it and making sure that the book cards have
that information.
But those 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 where they
have very long descriptions, we're also going
to 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 Pressbooks
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 cataloged 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
cataloged books will appear in the directory.
In fact, if I'm not mistaken, if I choose
to exclude the non-cataloged public books,
I believe that we take the choice away.
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 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
it 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 that in this sprint,
it's one of our goals.
So, that'll probably be there by mid-September,
and we'll give you all an update.
You can also expect, if you're a network manager
on a hosted Pressbooks 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 closer to ready for public release.
Yes, so thank you, Lillian, Apurva, Kathy,
there was a question about what the name of
the open source musical notation typeface
was.
It's called Bravura Text, there's this organization
called SMuFL, 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.
>>FEMALE: That's great, thank you for showing
that.
>>STEEL: So, that's www.smufl.org.fonts you
can read more about Bravura.
>>APURVA: Steel, 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 there
are a lot of copies of the same book on different
networks.
So, is there a way you can sort maybe by the
original book and then list all of the other
cloned copies to follow?
>>STEEL: Yeah, that was something that we
did make a change behind the scenes, Apurva.
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
of weeks ago.
So, we now turned that on, so it should be
whenever there is a tie in alphabetical name
it will try to display the original before
its children.
If you notice, I think the staging should
be updated there.
If you 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
feeling frustrating, you can always try to
use the is original, is a clone filter.
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, let me know,
and we can take a closer look.
Okay, so the next thing I want to 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 Pressbooks with H5P activities
and your learning management system, it's
called Results for LMS and Pressbooks 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 want to 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 plugin is 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 are some instructions, if
you have this turned on, how an instructor
could turn a Pressbooks chapter into a graded
activity.
So, it describes you add the H5P activities,
there's a little screenshot, some 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 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 that 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 space.
Okay, so the last 10 minutes as always this
is community roundtable time.
I'm going to 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 Pressbooks
or Pressbooks development or just open publishing
in your campus, time is yours.
Love to hear from you.
>>APURVA: Rebus recently supported the publication
of this collection called Open at the Margins,
I've just dropped a link to it in the chat.
It's a wonderful collection of very informal
works, blogposts, 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.
>>STEEL: Thanks, Apurva.
That looks great.
>>LAUREN: I can't remember if I mentioned
this at our last meeting, but we recently
have a Pressbooks book that was co-created
with students at UW in Rick Bonus' Critical
Filipinx 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 Bonus and students in his class
on it.
>>STEEL: Thanks Lauren, it looks like a really
exciting project as well.
>>LILLIAN: 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 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,
just by people just saying use a commercial
textbook.
>>ALLISON: We recently just released the electronic
version of a music theory text, that is the
text that Steel so kindly helped us.
And how we discovered Bravura Text together,
from my faculty member, who is really on the
up and up for these sorts of things.
So, we just have the online Pressbook version
available right now.
And we'll be having the PDF later this month.
But really the author put so much work into
it and it's really very detailed, lots of
multimedia resources in there.
So, hope people find it useful.
>>STEEL: Thanks, Allison, I had 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 huge, and it's really,
really an incredible impressive work by this
person.
And it's so exciting to see that it's openly
licensed.
So, well done to you and to Andre and everybody
who worked on it.
Tim, you want to tell us about this enormous
scholia project that's going on at Berkeley?
That one's been blowing my mind a little bit,
too.
>>TIM: Yeah.
One of the professors here, Donald Mastronarde,
he's trying to archive a huge Greek scholia
project that he's been working on for years,
I think.
And that's what Steel was mentioning, providing
the additional font support for that in Pressbooks
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 Steel and the Pressbooks support for helping
get this additional feature going.
So, we're excited about it.
>>STEEL: Yeah, this one's been pretty exciting
to me, it's like a multi thousand-page scholia
edition of Euripides.
So, if you're interested in 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 into
Pressbooks, which has been really gratifying
and he looks like he's nearly finished with
that.
And when it's public, I'm sure we'll have
a link to share.
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 in this call.
There is a very impressive film studies book
that was published at the University of Arkansas.
Do you want to say anything about that?
Or do you have anything you want to 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, an Introduction to Cinema.
It was Professor Russell Sharman there.
And it's one of the most impressive film studies
things that I had seen.
It's all openly licensed and it's again, like
that Andre Mount project.
Largely a one professor project with support
of course from the libraries and the publishing
folks there.
And I will drop the link in the chat, I think
it's pretty amazing.
I came across, you know you look at those
new books when they come out?
And this one, it was like an hour later, and
I was realizing I was still reading it, still
looking at it.
I was only going to 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 would like to talk about?
I can stop the recording now.
