Originally published at: https://pressbooks.org/blog/2019/10/05/open-source-call-10-07/
Our monthly Open Source call will take place at Monday, October 7 at 2pm Eastern on Zoom. Here’s the agenda.
Sorry I couldn’t make the open source call today. I was interested in the discussion about APA theming and citation. It’s been on my mind recently because we’ve been asked by the Graduate School of Education if Pressbooks might be a tool to display Masters Theses online.
I left a comment on the agenda, but I will copy it here as well
This might be something that SUNY Oneonta would be willing to collaborate on if there were some interest from the open community.
We’ve been researching a use case where we publish our Masters Theses in Pressbooks to make them more widely available. (Currently they are bound and put in the library.)
We identified our first step was to try to make a child theme that would set up the text, heading styles, and running head of APA style. We assumed that citations would have to be done in a manual way. We are just starting to play with this idea.
Hi Ed. Glad to hear it, as I said in the call, I think the best way to proceed is to investigate adding support for CSL to Pressbooks: https://citationstyles.org/ + https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles. There are a couple of WordPress plugins that do this, and combining them with something like Lumen’s Candela Citation would be really interesting (to me). Happy to work with you and/or @sswettenham on a feature request for this.
Hi Steel,
I guess I am talking about a much more lower level project. The project we are beginning to scope and take on is simply creating a theme that would format a thesis APA style.
I mean:
Running head in the appropriate location with page numbering
Headings match APA format
Margins match APA
Appropriate font
We’d be relying on the Pressbooks for Table of Contents and pagination.
In my solution students would still manually create a list of figures, do all citations, and create their bibliography by hand. My assumption is that most people would be writing their thesis in Google Docs or Microsoft Word and displaying it in Pressbooks at the end.
I’d be happy to be part of your focus group and/or beta testers, but I scoped the project much lower for myself.
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