LPC Blog

May 8, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Manifold

This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Manifold
Website: https://manifoldapp.org/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Manifold works with presses and publishers to create enhanced digital publications that are linked to audio and video files, interactive maps, and other kinds of digital resources. It is an open source project, and libraries have used it most often to create Open Educational Resources, utilizing the reading group and annotation features that Manifold has built to optimize classroom uses. We’ve also seen it used in the library space to give students the chance to become publishers themselves — to assemble and annotate archival material, anthologize their own writings, or to create new editions of classic texts.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

We recently released Version 8 of Manifold, which includes a rich text editor so that project creators can make changes to files they’ve ingested into the platform. We’ve tried to make the platform very intuitive and user friendly for everyone, but this is a big step forward in that process. Accessibility has also been an ongoing priority of our work and development of the platform, and we’ve been taking steps to make sure that the Manifold experience, whether that is simply reading, or annotating and engaging, or creating your own project, is as accessible to as many people as it possibly can be.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

A number of our team members are librarians, or have experience working in libraries. We’ve found that libraries and Manifold tend to be “on the same page” in terms of expanding offerings in the open access space, and providing low or no-cost educational materials to students. It has been great to work with library publishers and digital humanities centers to think creatively about what is possible to publish in Manifold; many of these experiments have driven our development of the platform. Recently we’ve seen art exhibit catalogs, audio archives and podcasts, textbooks, all sorts of cool projects coming from this space.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

We look forward to seeing some of our users who regularly attend our virtual Manifold Community Meetups in person! It’s also always exciting to see what other projects in the space have been up to, and to check in on the bigger picture things — the state of open infrastructure and the larger institutional questions that a lot of folks are thinking about.

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

We are a team of about a dozen working from three locations: the CUNY Graduate Center in New York; the University of Minnesota Press in Minneapolis; and the development firm Cast Iron Coding in Portland (Oregon). We’ve been meeting regularly online for about a decade now. Every once in a while we get together in person in one of our cities for a more in-depth, in-person discussion, meetings that have been known to lead into late night sessions in bars … Our official team portraitist Jojo Karlin does a lot of the artwork for our releases, and often makes scarily accurate drawings of our team which she calls “doodles.”

Useful resources

• Modern Humanities Textbook – Kingsborough Community College – Winner of a 2023 OE Global Open Reuse / Remix / Adaptation Award
• Cut/Copy/Paste by Whitney Trettien – Finalist for the ACLS Open Access Book Prize
• Making an exhibit catalog with Manifold video – Emory Center for Digital Scholarship
• Freedom Seekers: Escaping Slavery in Restoration London – winner of the ACLS Open Access Book Prize in the History category

May 7, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Pressbooks

This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Pressbooks 
Website: https://pressbooks.com/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Pressbooks is the versatile, user-friendly publishing platform educators rely on to create, adapt, and share accessible, interactive, web-first books. We partner with organizations to support open education initiatives, institutional publishing programs, curriculum development projects, and more.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

Pressbooks works with over 500 educational institutions, including many higher education systems and consortia. As we’ve added more of these statewide and regional partners, we’ve been learning more about their unique needs so we can make sure our product fits those needs.

Over the past several months, we’ve worked closely with eCampusOntario, a consortial client, as a co-development partner helping us design new administrative features for this part of our community. We’re excited to launch the result of that work, our new Shared Network Plugin. It’s currently in beta testing, but we’ll be launching it broadly soon. This new feature set will make it easier for system and consortia clients to empower their members and manage how they use Pressbooks to create and share knowledge effectively across their member networks through streamlined administration, enhanced analytics and more.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

At Pressbooks, we love the commitment that library publishers have to making knowledge more accessible (whether that’s through open educational resources or other initiatives). Empowering knowledge sharing is at the heart of Pressbooks’ mission as a company, and so we’ve always found great alignment with those who work in library publishing.

Also, libraries are at the point of the proverbial spear with regard to information and digital transformation. It’s exciting to work with library publishers because they have been eager to embrace the possibilities of digital transformation when it comes to publishing and sharing information. Lots of great ideas and experimentation come out of this community.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

Post-pandemic it’s still a bit novel to be able to meet up with people in person, so we’re looking forward to the unique energy that comes from in-person meetings. A lot of long-time Pressbooks clients will attend this meeting, and we always love connecting with our user community and hopefully making new friends. Open education is a strong thread through this year’s conference, so it will be great to listen and learn about what others are seeing and doing in this space. We’re also excited to host two panel sessions on Thursday morning, “From OER to Open Press and Open Impact: The Evolution of Large-Scale Open Education Initiative,” and “Growing OER Publishing Programs: Watershed Decisions that Drive Impact.”

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

The team at Pressbooks is made up of people who rally behind the mission of making knowledge sharing more accessible. We have a lot of publishing pros, bibliophiles, open source advocates and edtech evangelists. Our founder/CEO, Hugh McGuire, is a familiar face for many in the OER publishing space from his work with Pressbooks as well as The Rebus Foundation. Another longtime colleague, Steel Wagstaff, was an enthusiastic Pressbooks customer supporting open publishing at the University of Wisconsin Madison before he joined the team and became our product manager. Julie Curtis will be at the Forum on behalf of Pressbooks. Julie, our VP Growth & Strategy, has spent much of her career in education technology helping institutions navigate the intersection of digital learning and open educational resources. Together with several of our institutional partners, Julie created the Open Education Maturity Model as a framework to help institutions in this work, and she’ll be presenting this model during the “From OER to Open Press” panel session.

Useful resources

• Open Education Reference Guide
• Pressbooks Overview
• Pressbooks & Accessibility Practices

May 2, 2024

2024 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Janeway + Fulcrum

This year we invited our Forum Sponsors ($1k and above) to answer some questions for the blog so we can get to know them a bit better!

Sponsor name: Janeway + Fulcrum
Website: https://janewayfulcrum.olh.pub/

Q: Give us your elevator pitch – the briefest possible summary of what your organization does.

Between our two programs, we build world-leading, open-source digital publishing infrastructure to provide a sustainable platform for open access journals and media-rich books. Our in-house software engineers have developed an intuitive, agile, and responsive platform for journal hosting, migration, manuscript submission, review, copyediting, and typesetting (Janeway) and an accessible, durable, flexible, discoverable platform for book publishing (Fulcrum). We’re proud to have done this work fully within the academy.

Q: What’s something you’re working on that’s new or exciting?

Our teams are working on integrating Janeway and Fulcrum, allowing us to host audiovisual media in Fulcrum where it can be preserved on library infrastructure, and have its own metadata and DOI. This allows journals to embed media in their articles using accessible media playing technology and to avoid relying on commercial services like YouTube and Vimeo for scholarly media content.

Q: Why do you like working with library publishers?

Andy Byers, Janeway: I find working with library publishers deeply rewarding due to their alignment with values of open access and knowledge dissemination. Library publishers prioritise community impact over commercial interests, allowing for meaningful contributions to academia and society. Collaborating with library publishers offers a unique chance to contribute to a more inclusive, sustainable, and impactful scholarly ecosystem.

Jason Colman, Fulcrum: We are library publishers ourselves at Michigan Publishing, so getting a chance to collaborate more deeply with our peers is always enriching. They’re trying to solve the same problems we are and working together helps remind us that we are not alone in the challenges we face.

Q: What are you looking forward to at the Forum?

Seeing colleagues we only talk to on Zoom and Discord, of course! Our teams first met each other at the 2018 Forum in Minneapolis, so this year will be like a reunion for us.

Q: Tell us something about the people who make up your organization (If you have a small team, you could introduce them. If you have a bigger team, you could tell us a bit about what you’re like as a group or how you work together.)

The Janeway / Open Library of Humanities team are based at Birkbeck, University of London, but make up a geographically distributed network of expert bookworms, specialist software developers, and typography enthusiasts. Although we work remotely from across the UK and beyond, we’re united by our belief in the power of shared knowledge and our commitment to the open-access revolution. We also have a shared love of arts and culture, retro gaming, AI glitches, and dreadful puns, and a strong desire to make the world of academic publishing a better place.

The Fulcrum team is based at the University of Michigan Library, and most of us are located in Michigan, although we have folks based in Colorado, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania as well. We’re a group of librarians, technologists, and publishing experts and we’re dedicated to ensuring the broadest access to knowledge we possibly can. Our puns may be more dreadful than the Janeway team’s, but we’ll have to have a pun-off to be sure…