June was a bustling summer month for all of us at Pressbooks – we welcomed a new team member, shipped a few new features and bug fixes for Pressbooks, and prepared for the launch of pressbooks.pub, our new subscription service for individual authors! Here’s a rundown of what we were up to in June:
Welcome Michelle Weremczuk, our new UX/UI Designer
First of all, we’re thrilled to announce that Michelle Weremczuk has joined our team in June as Pressbooks’ new UX/UI designer! Michelle has an extensive background in design. She began her career as an exhibit designer at the Royal Alberta Museum and worked there for nearly a decade, where she honed her interest in experience design, especially learning in physical spaces. She also impressed us with her more recent experience with digital experience design techniques and methods. Her first big project will be working with users to lead the redesign of our Aldine Network Catalogue!
New call to action banner on book homepages & reading interface
In June, we also added small, dismissable CTA banners to webbook homepages and the reading interface.
These banners invite readers to a simple information page on our marketing site which provides information about adopting and adapting openly licensed resources with Pressbooks. These CTAs will automatically be displayed using the branded colours for the networks that they appear on, and can be dismissed by readers at the book level if they no longer wish to see them. Our hope is that this simple intervention will both improve general awareness of OER and lead to wider adoption of free, openly licensed learning material.
Updated BISAC terms
In June we also released a small change which updates the BISAC subject terms to use the 2021 edition released by BISG. Pressbooks users should now be able to use any of the newly released terms when applying BISAC subject headings from their book info pages, and will have any deprecated terms in use automatically updated to recommended replacements the next time they save their book info.
Cloning Routine Improvements
Finally, we released a bug fix for our cloning routine so that ‘unlisted’ glossary terms (public terms that have been selected for exclusion from the automatically generated glossary lists) will still be cloned and referenced normally when books are clones.
July product webinar
If you’d like to see the recording from our last webinar, it can be found on YouTube: June 2022 Pressbooks Product Update - YouTube. We look forward to seeing those of you who can make it at our next monthly product update (July 28th from 2-3pm ET), where we’ll be showcasing the new pressbooks.pub subscription offering and seeking feedback on our proposed redesign for the Aldine network catalogue.