Hi all, I just realized that the ability to edit and provide Book Contributor info is only available to those with the role of Administrator on a book.
I’m wondering if Pressbooks would consider changing this so that book Editors and Authors can also access the Contributors page and create/edit contributor information.
I’m currently working on a book project with other authors and asked them all to go in and update their Contributor info so that we could display contributors at the book level via a Contributors page. It doesn’t specify in the User Guide that this can only be done by Book Admins, so none of my co-authors could do this.
As an alternative, would it be possible for the information users (of any role) add to their Profile page be able to be imported into the Contributors info (as their picture does now)?
Basically, I’d like to create an easier way to ask book authors and editors to update their contributor info so that I can easily display the Contributors at a book or chapter level without having to do this all myself as the Admin. Thank you!
-Lauren
Hi @olray, thanks for sharing this. Both approaches you suggest make sense to me and will be of interest to the tech team. We’ve just updated the chapter on Contributors in the User Guide to note this current limitation.
I believe there’s one scenario where all available info from a user’s Profile page is pulled into their Contributor entry, which is when a user is initially added to a book and their Contributor entry is auto-generated. But from then on, it’s true, updating Contributor info is limited to Book Admins and I can see how this would be overly limited in a collaborative context.
@olray the permissions issue is a little tricky. I’m not sure that we would want editors/authors to have the ability to edit book contributors. Maybe we’d grant it to the editor role, but it seems like too much power to grant authors, relative to their other permissions in a book.
One workaround would be to temporarily grant these collaborators the book admin role until they’d updated their contributor profiles and then change them back to the desired/expected role. Not a great solution in terms of labor savings, but it’s a thought?
@ThomasWeideman do we know what would happens on a test book if:
a) we removed certain user(s) from a book and deleted the autogenerated contributor for those user(s)
b) we updated the user profile info for one or more of these users
c) we added the user(s) back to the book
would contributors be autogenerated with the new info at that point?
As a last idea, perhaps you could make a dummy book after user profile changes had been made and add users there. Then you could potentially export/import the contributors from the dummy book to the desired book. All of these solutions seem a bit tedious, but they’re potential workarounds that might help until a better permissions solution could be found.
For the book project I’m working on now, there are only a few (faculty) authors so I’ve made them Admins so that they can add this info themselves.
This workaround is fine for this context but I would love it if there was an easier way for book authors/editors in the future to input their own biographical info (either via their Profile or accessing the Contributors page) so that I can display the Contributors at a book or chapter level without too much labor for me as the book Admin.
Thanks!
-Lauren
I wanted to check back in on this to see if this was something that might be possible now (since only book admins can access the Contributors page to create/edit contributor info):
would it be possible for the information users (of any role) add to their Profile page be able to be easily imported into the Contributors info (as their picture does now)?
Thanks!
I’m realizing I went through steps for a book I’m supporting (and now have some questions) that relate to this Book Contributors topic, so thought I’d post them here. Here was my process:
A few months ago I set up a book for a class of around 24 students who have each been adding a chapter with their own work.
I instructed students to fill out their name, bio and add a pic to their Profile in Pressbooks.
I then added each of the students as Contributors under Book Info.
It was my assumption that the Book Authors page would automatically update with the student name/pic/bio as they updated them under their Profile.
My questions: Is my assumption above wrong (even for the profile pic)? It looks like as a Network Manager I can see the student Profiles when I go to Manage Users and click Edit under each author name - in that way I can copy/paste the student bio over their information on Book Info - Contributors, and in that way their bio will show up. But is there a way to copy over the image they have added themselves to their own Profile page (via gravatar)?
Hey @olray – great questions and thanks for the clear description of your workflow. Here’s the problem, as I understand it – information is synced from the user profile to the ‘contributor’ ONLY when that user is originally added to a book. If the user’s profile information is updated after they’re added to the book, the information is not synced. This is by design and very unlikely to be changed, as it has the potential to break contributor info in hundreds of books if/when a user decides to edit their profiles. Here are a couple of ideas we came up with:
Change your workflow slightly – as step 1, perhaps you simply add these students to the network (and not to a book). Step 2: Ask them to update their profile information. Once this is done, Step 3: add them to the book and check the ‘add without requiring the confirmation email’. The result will be that their contributor is created with the gravatar photo and profile info added during step two.
You could ask them to upload their profile photo to the book media library (instead of or in addition to gravatar) and then you could associate those with their contributor directly. You could also open their gravatar image from their user profile, but you have to manually edit the URL to get the 400x400 image and that’s a little gross (my gravatar image is https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/aaa557194fad420e3237cb612c27d5768cec1749d6c2b42809696893da29acba?s=96&d=mm&r=g to get the 400 px version, i have to change s=96 parameter to s=400 so that it becomes https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/aaa557194fad420e3237cb612c27d5768cec1749d6c2b42809696893da29acba?s=400
We could open a feature request to add an ‘owner’ to each contributor (like we do for chapters and front/back matter). If a contributor was assigned to an owner, it could then be edited by any author who ‘owned’ it – just as we do with other content in Pressbooks (see https://guide.pressbooks.com/chapter/create-and-edit-chapters/#chapter-189-section-9)
Thanks very much @SteelWagstaff ! Appreciate the ideas - here’s my response to each
I don’t think this workflow would work for classes given the way I work with instructors to set up a book and scaffold student learning in the platform, but I appreciate the idea and this helps me better understand the sequence necessary to have the gravatar photo/profile show up in Contributor. Because we generally want to get students into a specific book immediately when logging into Pressbooks and onboard them to the platform, give them time to consider various factors around what it means to publish openly, and give them time to consider opting out of having their contributions published, they usually don’t consider their profile/image until they’re close to being done with their chapters. This has been my experience so far.
This will definitely work for this class and another one I’m working with this quarter. I’ll work on copy/pasting their bios over and edit their photos before copying them over to Contributors. Last year, I had students email their pics/bios to the instructor who then entered them manually in Contributors before we created the Book Authors page. I was trying to save the instructor some work this year by having the students add their own bio/pic to Profile. It would be great if there was a way for users with an Editor/Author role to be given permission to edit their own Contributor entry - saving myself and the instructor from having to manually do so. But, for these projects it’s helpful to know that this is a workaround. I had already instructed the students this quarter that if they update their Profile, they’ll show up on Book Authors, so I’d rather go ahead and work on this for them. (here’s the current book where I’m copying over the info).
Could you provide more explanation on this - I’m not sure I’m understanding how this would work.
Thanks!
For #3 i’m envisioning something like this: Add 'owner' metadata to contributor post types and treat similarly to other book content · Issue #4072 · pressbooks/pressbooks · GitHub. You can already assign front/back matter or chapters to an ‘owner’ – this person can then edit the chapter, etc. if they have the ‘author’ role in the book. I’m proposing doing the same thing with a contributor. Network and book admins can always edit contributor info, no matter who the owner is, but if you’re a book editor or author, you’d then be able to edit any ‘contributors’ that you were made the owner of. There’d be a little dropdown that lets each contributor be assigned to an owner, much like there is now for chapters & front/back matter content types.
Thank you! Yes, that would help a great deal if that feature could be created. For each of the book projects I’ve worked on with classes, students and instructors really like the Book Contributors feature, and having more control over contributors would help our workflow a great deal! Is there any more information you need from me?