On Wednesday January 26th, we heard presentations from our CUNY Libraries colleagues Robin Miller and Andrew McKinney on the digital publishing platforms Manifold and Pressbooks, respectively. Andy was joined by GSLIS fellows Elizabeth Arestyl and Rachel Nevins, who have been working together with Andy to help bring Pressbooks to CUNY.

Manifold

Robin started us off discussing Manifold, an online publishing platform that got its start in 2012, developed at the CUNY Graduate Center, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota Press and Cast Iron Coding.

It is a place to publish open electronic books, and soon journals, at CUNY.

Manifold can be used for:

  • Textbooks
  • Monographs
  • Student projects
    • Undergraduate work
    • Essay anthologies
  • Personal projects
  • Workbooks, manuals, and guides

Though it is not an editing platform, it’s possible to bring in many different types of resources to augment your Manifold book, such as:

  • Interactive Media
  • Data Visualizations
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Powerpoint presentations
  • Excel spreadsheets
  • PDFs

Manifold is also a responsive platform (as is the OpenLab), built for students, with accessibility in mind.

  • It is adaptable for phone, tablet, and laptop. Everything can be done on any of these devices.
  • Can be used with adaptive technologies

Projects on Manifold can be downloaded for offline use in the following formats:

  • EPUB
  • PDF

Many great projects on Manifold at CUNY include:

Support

Register for an account: Anyone with a CUNY affiliation can create projects on Manifold that can be shared around the world. You can collaborate with colleagues at other institutions and publish on Manifold, as long as one creator is connected to CUNY.

Robin Miller is available by email at rmiller2@gc.cuny.edu to set up meetings to discuss Manifold, answer questions, and work through ideas. She can also be available for presentations, workshops, and tutorials on Manifold.

PressBooks 

Next, we heard from the Pressbooks team which included Andrew McKinney, OER Coordinator at CUNY Office of Library Services, and Elizabeth Arestyl and Rachel Nevins, GSLIS fellows from Queens College. They introduced us to a new digital authoring and publishing platform at CUNY, Pressbooks, built on the popular WordPress platform.

As they are just getting started, the first publication for CUNY Pressbooks will be a how-to user guide for Pressbooks. Pressbooks, as a platform, spans a wide variety of resources across 112 networks. You can find open textbooks outside CUNY at the Pressbooks directory.

Pressbooks users can create a book, starting from scratch or importing an existing book. You can also clone a book from the Pressbooks network, to edit and customize to your teaching context. Editing and navigation of book content is through the WordPress editor and dashboard, so it will be familiar to those of you that have used the platform before. Two people can work on a book simultaneously, as long as it is not the same section.

Tools available on Pressbooks include:

  • H5P
    • Create interactive content such as quizzes and data visualizations

  • MathJax
    • Create and display mathematical equations within your text
    • Supports LaTeX, AsciiMath, and MathML
    • Use shortcodes to define LaTeX in the visual and text editors. MathJax does the rest.

  • Hypothes.is
    • An annotation tool for your textbook. Allows for instructors and students to include notes and highlights within a textbooks
    • Integrated into Pressbooks
    • Any users with Pressbooks account can add annotations
    • Annotations can be available for whole book or just parts of books
    • Can create private groups for just your class/students for annotations

Pressbooks can support LTI

  • There is an ability to have your Pressbooks book available on BlackBoard, though that functionality is not available yet
  • There is also a pilot for H5P tools to assess and push grading into BlackBoard

Support

Register for an account: Email Andy at andrew.mckinney@cuny.edu to create an account.

The Pressbooks User Guide is quite robust and can provide self-directed assistance.

If there are plug-ins that you need for your book that are not currently available, contact Andy McKinney who will discuss the possibility with PressBooks.

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