Make Your Book
Find Books on the Pressbooks Directory
The Pressbooks Directory is designed to help people quickly find desired resources, no matter whether they are looking for a specific book or multiple resources spanning one or more topics. You can use faceted search/filtering, full-text search, and various sorting and display options to help you find what you’re looking for.
To get started with the Directory, we recommend users ‘Take the tour’ by clicking the button in the top right of the Directory’s header or the ‘self-guided tour’ link in the Directory’s welcome paragraph.
By default, the Pressbooks Directory will include most public books on your network, though individual authors can choose to exclude their public books from being listed in the directory.
Search the Directory
The Directory includes a search bar in the “Find a book” section which allows you to search the full text of all available metadata for all of the books included in the Directory.
Search terms (strings) must be at least three characters long and can contain partial phrases: the query ‘medi’ will return results containing the words ‘media’, ‘medicine’, or ‘medical’, for example. If multiple strings are entered, an implicit AND operator will be added, meaning that results will only be shown if they contain each of the terms used in the query. Most languages support some degree of ‘typo tolerance‘, which means that results will be displayed for phrases/words if even they have minor differences in spelling or spacing.
To search for an exact phrase, enclose the full phrase in quotation marks: i.e. “open education”. Typo tolerance is disabled for terms enclosed in quotation marks. These queries are not case sensitive.
To exclude a string or phrase from the results, use the ‘-‘ character just before the term you wish to exclude (this acts as a NOT operator). For example, the query ‘writing “open education” -pedagogy’ would return all of the records which contain the word ‘writing’ AND the phrase “open education” but NOT the word ‘pedagogy’.
Some metadata facets can be searched explicitly via the search bar through the use of a specific prefix. Fields which support this feature include subject (subj:’query’), language (lang:’query’), network (net:’query’), and publisher (pub:’query’). If you wanted to find all of the English language books published by the Rebus Community on the Rebus network with a subject containing the word philosophy, you could use the following query: ‘lang:English pub:”Rebus Community” net:Rebus subj:philosophy’.
Share Your Search Query
Each specific search query or combination of filters generates a unique URL in the browser bar which encodes the specific query values. Query URLs can be bookmarked, saved, and shared to allow anyone to recreate your specific query at some future time and retrieve dynamic results at the time that they input the URL.
To share the URL for a query you’ve performed, Click the ‘Share this query‘ button to the right of the s