Adaption questions

@Jan Coville

Re: Jan’s adaption of Blueprint for Success in College: Career Decision Making, https://granite.pressbooks.pub/careerdevelopment/

Thanks for your willingness to share your version!

I finally had the opportunity to take a look and I love your work!

I am going to schedule some more time to go over it in more detail, but it looks like you have done something that had been on my list – that is to make some of the links/videos/resources more current and (hopefully) more appealing to students.

I am hopeful your example gives creative inspiration (and courage) to others who may be considering taking on something similar.

Wonderful work and thank you again!

@apurva: I noticed that the same hiccup of the author’s name is showing in the webbook (and perhaps the exports) in Jan’s version - making it look like it is duplicated. This presented some logistical questions that I hadn’t thought of before… if I notice a bug or make a change in my original, would it be helpful to pass it along to Pressbooks, and/or Rebus, and/or @Jan if anyone wanted to look into it in their version(s) as well? And in the same way that I think it would be helpful if any of the original authors were to let me know if their work was updated, should I be thinking about doing the same for adapters of my work? It seems it may be helpful to develop a adaption/remix “tree” with a communication flow…

Thank you,
Dave

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Thanks for sharing the link to Jan’s adaptation of the Blueprint for Success book :slight_smile: Great to see you taking inspiration from her project! (I don’t believe she has an account on the platform as yet, which is why she might not have been tagged)

Dave, to your question: this isn’t a bug, as the author name controls on your book in the Rebus Press were heavily customized using CSS. This would definitely be something to notify Jan about, in case she wanted to make corrections in her adaptation, however I’ll always advise against relying too much on CSS customizations as this can make books brittle with changes over time.

That’s a great idea! I think ultimately it comes down to what kind of changes the original authors made, and how relevant these might be for your book or for adapters who relied on your book. Being open and communicative about updates or changes is definitely good practice, so that current or future adapters have a sense of the book’s evolution/timeline. The Version History on your books is already doing a lot of this work, so you could point adapters of your books to this back matter section, with pathways back to this platform so they can communicate with you or other adopters/adapters.

Your idea of a remix/adaptation ‘tree’ is definitely interesting – if you and your adapters could flesh this out in more detail, or indicate what information here would be most useful, I could pass along to @zoe as she works on further developing this platform and also to the Pressbooks team, who have been making small improvements to track version histories between books on Pressbooks.

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Thanks for the clarification on the customization @apurva. I vaguely recall we designed some of the customization because the chapter title display wasn’t showing correctly a long time ago. Going forward, would you have recommendations for preventing the author’s name to appear twice in the chapters for the future? As best I know it was only showing one author until recently. And would you have a recommendation for Jan’s revision?

Thanks,
Dave

No problem! I’d suggest removing the author name from the main body text, and only listing it in the chapter metadata. This should work best for Jan’s book. And on yours – I believe this display issue was fixed using CSS, so there’s no need for any other changes right now. Hope this helps!

Hey Dave! Finding ways to connect & navigate adaptations/different versions of a text is a super interesting challenge, but a super complex one, too. What we’re working towards first is at least creating spaces where people can talk to each other about the versions they find or are working on, and the next step will be figuring out connections. One of many fun problems to try solve as we build out proper infrastructure for OER :smile:

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