A frequent question I receive as a Network Admin is “how can I share my Pressbooks book draft with individuals outside of our university so they can add comments/annotations?”. I usually give them a short answer re: password protecting chapters and enabling Hypothesis but today I decided to come up with more detailed instructions for this that will hopefully make it easier for users. I’m wondering if others have feedback on these instructions and anything I am missing or ways of simplifying them:
Dear faculty member X,
In order to allow non-UW individuals to annotate your book in Pressbooks, what you can do is password protect your chapters, make the book public, share the password with the non-UW collaborators, and set up the Hypothesis tool in Pressbooks to allow them to annotate as they read the chapters.
Here are steps for doing this:
- From your book Dashboard, click Organize. For chapters that you’d like your collaborators to be able to annotate, make sure “Show in Web” is turned on. Click on each of these chapters individually and check “Require a Password” in the Status & Visibility menu on the right side. Create a password (for simplicity, you can use the same password for all chapters). Repeat this for all book chapters that you’d like collaborators to annotate.
- From the Organize menu, if you’d like to hide any chapters from view/annotation, turn off Show in Web. More details about these settings can be found under Book Privacy and Exporting and under Status and Visibility Settings.
- From the Organize menu, click Public at the top under “This book’s global privacy…” This changes your entire book settings to public. It will allow people to visit your book website and view the chapters you have made visible only after entering the password you have set. If needed, more information on these settings here.
- From your book Dashboard, click Settings > Hypothesis on the left navigation menu. Check the box beside “Highlights on by default”, “Sidebar open by default” and under Content Settings select “Allow on chapters” and any other parts you choose. These steps configure the Hypothesis annotation tool so that your collaborators can annotate your book chapters. More information on these settings here.
- Share the public link to your book and password with your collaborators. When they visit your book and click on the book chapters, they will be prompted to enter the password you gave them, and will also see a Hypothesis pop-up on the right side of the screen. They’ll then be able to highlight text on the chapter and annotate it. If they don’t already have a Hypothesis account, they can easily create one for free at that point. There are also instructions on setting up a Hypothesis account in the Hypothesis Quick Start Guide). I’d strongly recommend viewing this 5 minute video that explains how Hypothesis works for annotation in Pressbooks.
- On your end, you’ll now be able to view the annotations that these collaborators have left on your book by going to your book’s public URL and clicking on each chapter (where you’ll also have to enter the password you set). You should then see the annotations others have made.
I realize these are many steps, but this is the only solution (besides sharing your work via another platform like Google docs) to sharing your work with non-UW collaborators for feedback/annotation. I’m happy to meet over zoom if you’d like to explain Hypothesis further and do a walk-through with you, if you’d like.
Thanks for any feedback you have on this message! Lauren