Day/Time/Room
June 18, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. | North Ballroom
Title: Introducing Digital Press Plus: A Press/Vendor Collaboration for Supplementary Teaching Materials
Presenters:
- Harrison W. Inefuku, Digital Press Lead, Iowa State University
- Andy Byers, Director of Publishing Technology, Birkbeck University of London
- Abbey K. Elder, she/they, Open Education Services Librarian, Iowa State University
Description: Many downstream users of open educational resources (OER) have concerns about the availability of supplemental materials such as presentation slides, homework, and lecture notes. Authors can make these materials available in several ways; however, many of the solutions commonly used obfuscate the availability of materials or put undue pressure on authors. In this presentation, we introduce Digital Press +, a repository that houses supplemental materials for books published by the Digital Press, a publishing unit housed in the Iowa State University Library.
The Digital Press+, funded by Iowa State University’s Course Affordability Jump Start Initiative, was developed in partnership with the technology developers at the Open Library of Humanities alongside several updates to the team’s Books plug-in. The project connects content in the Digital Press’ repository plug-in to the materials in their books catalog, allowing the simple cross-linking of connected materials. This also allows for external submissions, which can facilitate the sharing of new materials to supplement and support previously published OER.
The collaborators who worked on the development of this project will share how the Digital Press + utilizes the capabilities of the linked repository and books plug-ins for the publication of OER. For others interested in supporting open source development projects like this one, the presenters will share the process by which the team got grant funding for their work, the steps it took to develop the project, and other potential use cases of OLH’s repository plug-in for library publishers.