I have a very unique use-case from a group of professors building a Faculty Handbook through a grant-funded project at our university. They would like to leverage Pressbooks and its plugin enhancements to create a space where faculty can UPLOAD and SEARCH for ‘tagged’ pedagogical documents via some sort of advanced search tool that would be both powerful and easy to use.
I know there are a myriad of document manager plugins, and I can even imagine Hypothesis helping fulfill part of their “search” need due to it’s tagging feature and dynamic search interface.
However, I wondered if anyone might be able to speak to experience they’ve had with file management integration within Pressbooks / WordPress or might be willing to help me make sense of whether this even makes sense to pursue in this platform.
Hi Jim, it doesn’t sound like this really fits within Pressbooks. If the pedagogical documents aren’t the books in a network, then you’d be building in some custom functionality in the network root to handle soemething that’s only tangentially related to what Pressbooks does (publish books). I’d suggest looking elsewhere for this, as I don’t see the management of arbitrary resources outside of the book context going on our roadmap. If I stumble upon anything that seems like a good solution I’ll pass it on.
Hi Jim, it sounds like you’re trying to build something like a repository for teaching documents. We built a custom solution in Drupal 10 years ago that we call LessonShare: http://lessonshare.wisc.edu, but I’m working currently to try to move that content into something else (exploring OER Commons right now: https://www.oercommons.org). Perhaps you have an institutional repository of some kind already in operation that might be used for this purpose? I’m guessing your scholarly communications librarian would have some good idea as well.
Thanks for your input @ned. Based on you input, I have begun to pursue other avenues. I’ll reach back out should I require further assistance in regard to this topic.
Great idea, @SteelWagstaff ! I touched base with our Schol. Comm. librarian this afternoon and have a meeting setup for Monday morning. It turns out we do have a bepress powered repository: http://stars.library.ucf.edu/ with a robust search engine et al. We plan to work out the technical details on Monday (e.g. how to best tag the assets). Thanks, again! —I’m going to look into the oercommons angle, too, as I know there is an LTI integration piece that may weave well into what they are trying to accomplish from that end!