4 Starting your Pressbook and Planning Templates
The strength and effectiveness of a Pressbooks publication for students, instructors, faculty, and staff begins from the initial planning process and involves thinking outside the box from traditional books. By utilizing the functions and plug-ins within Pressbooks, your book can become more interactive, visual, and colourful. A well-organized book is beneficial for all, but especially for individuals using accessibility tools.
As with traditional scholarly publications, your book will require peer review by at least two subject-matter experts and revision by a copy editor.
Considerations of accessibility, equity, and diversity should be at the forefront as you plan your publication. Learners should be able to “see themselves” accurately in the material presented while being exposed to a variety of perspectives, experiences, and identities. Before you embark on your project, we encourage you to review the following:
- Accessibility Checklist
- Criteria for Peer Review
- The Rubric for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
- Video: What Does It Mean To Decolonise the Curriculum?
4.1 Pressbooks Publication Planning Templates
To assist you in planning your Pressbooks OER, NorQuest College has developed several templates to guide you through the process. These include:
- A Pressbooks OER Book Design Map Guide
- A Pressbooks OER Chapter Planning Guide
Examples of these templates are provided at the end of this guide.
4.1.1 Pressbooks OER Style Sheet
The Style Sheet can be used to help guide you in determining the look, structure, citation style, and language of your Pressbooks publication.
4.1.2 Graphics and Media Attribution Tracker
The Graphics and Media Attribution Tracker provides a space to record the information and hyperlinks associated with any multimedia you will be adding to your book. This includes the title, author, source, and licensing information of these items. As Pressbooks publications are open educational resources, it is strongly suggested that any multimedia used with the book is Creative Commons (CC) licensed and proper attribution for their use is provided.
When you are uploading your images and other media to Pressbooks, these items will be uploaded to the Media Library within your book. A list of the different file formats that can be uploaded to the Media Library can be found here. When you upload an image to the Media Library, you should also enter its licensing information, alternative text, and caption on the Edit Media page. This ensures that proper attribution and citation of media is included in your book. See Figures 6 through 9 below for more details.
Figure 6. Media Library with three media items uploaded and displayed in grid-format
Figure 7. Select Add New for the Upload New Media page to add media file(s) to the Media Library
Figure 8. Edit Media page shows after uploading an image file (top half of page shown here)
Figure 9. Edit Media page continued from Figure 8. Licen