Session 10: Formatting and Release Preparation

Textbook Success Program October 2019 Cohort
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@oct19-cohort, today’s session at 1pm ET on Zoom (at our usual link) is on Formatting and Release Preparation. We’ll discuss all the final things to keep in mind before you’re ready to release your OER.

Take a look at the handout and slides we’ll be referring to:

  1. Handout: Formatting and Release Preparation
  2. Slides: Formatting and Release Preparation

Catch you all later today. :smiley:

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@oct19-cohort — looks like we have a bit of a mixup with our Zoom link! Please join us at this link instead to kick off the session: https://zoom.us/j/4579568053.

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Thanks everyone for joining our session last week and accommodating with our tech issues. We still got a chance to hear wonderful progress reports, and chat about the final touches leading up to release.

I’ve saved our chat transcript for anyone who’d like to refer to this conversation or see the resources shared. We saw:

I’ve added all these links to the handout for the session, along with some of the examples that I screen-shared during our call. :slight_smile:

There were also good questions:

  • Samantha @dannick asked: “Is it worth including a note if you’re not going to include a “usual suspect”? For example, I’ve seen comments in reviews of OER that there’s no index but, as noted in the previous slide/screen an index might not be appropriate for an OER”
  • @chloe.lei asked about book metadata: “Are open textbooks usually assigned DOI? Why or why not?”
  • Anita wanted to find out about cover design: “How do you manage design-by-committee delays? What do you do if someone on the team doesn’t like the cover?”

If any of you weren’t able to share your thoughts on these questions during our session, please feel free to dive into them here. @alexisclifton suggested that Amanda & Allison might have thoughts on that last one particularly — let us know if so! We’d also love more ideas on how to celebrate a book’s release, be it a party, vacation, sabbatical, or something else! :wink:

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Hmm, @arwalz that’s a tough one about the committee deciding on a cover design…

Especially when working with a group of people that need to agree on a design, I try to involve them in decision-making from the beginning of coming up with concepts (e.g. draft up 2-3 options and the group has to decide which elements of each they like), then bring the next iteration to them to see how their choices panned out–making edits as necessary from there (if timeline is tight, making sure to emphasize how many rounds of edits will be doable). During these discussions the group usually finds out who has strong opinions about what, and what things they are more willing to bend on.

However, if time is extremely tight, I’d probably lean on the fact that the majority likes the cover, or try to pinpoint one or two small elements that could be easily adjusted to assuage the naysayer :).

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