Introduction
Your new Pressbooks network is now set up. Congratulations!
We’re so excited to support your university publishing endeavors, and hope you enjoy using Pressbooks to produce high-quality open textbooks and other educational materials. We’ve compiled this guide to help you in your role as a Pressbooks network manager.
What is a Network Manager?
Network managers are the contact points between Pressbooks support staff and an institution who has purchased hosting and support through a Pressbooks plan. Network managers typically serve as the front line of support of first point of contact for users of their Pressbooks network. As a result, network managers are often university support staff with some knowledge of publishing, web design, or open education, like librarians or instructional designers. Network managers do not require technical expertise beyond basic familiarity with and comfort using the Pressbooks platform, though it can be helpful for at least one network manager to have have a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS.
Since you have a Pressbooks network, support for network managers is just an email away. As a network manager, whenever you run into any potential bugs, unexpected behavior, or other support issues, please contact us at the Premium Support email address you received in your Pressbooks onboarding. This is your expedited channel to our technical support desk.
The number of users who can be given the ‘network manager’ role is determined by the type of Pressbooks subscription your institution has purchased. To see a current list of users currently designated as network managers, click ‘Network Admin‘ -> ‘Settings‘. To request a change to this list, please contact us at the Premium Support email address.
Users designated as network managers have administrative access and powers beyond those of ordinary users in the Pressbooks network. Here are the main things that network managers can do that regular users cannot:
- Change network options and configure settings for the network, including options around user and book registration for the network
- Configure the appearance of the root network (i.e. control the landing page and menus that users see when they visit the root site of your Pressbooks network)
- Add/remove public books to the network’s ‘catalog’
- Access all books on the network, even books they are not users in
- View and modify users
- View stats and network analytics for your network
- Clone non-openly licensed book or book chapters on their network (Regular users can only clone books that are openly licensed and public on a Pressbooks network.) This would be useful, for instance, if your university has created a copyrighted resource which you wish to copy and adapt for another course.
Additional Resources
- The Pressbooks User Guide goes into depth on both basic and advanced features of Pressbooks, such as creating footnotes, configuring a table of contents, editing your book’s CSS, and testing your ebook across platforms. The guide also features a large section devoted to features specific to educational publishing.
- We maintain several tutorial videos that demonstrate how to do things users frequently ask us about on the Pressbooks YouTube channel. In particular, you may be interested in our training video series for network managers
- Monthly Product Update: On the last Thursday of each month, our product manager hosts a live and virtual webinar over Zoom to share recent product updates, talk about new features in development, and facilitate a community roundtable. This meeting is open to all who are interested in attending, though attendees tend to me network managers of hosted EDU or open source networks.
- Community of Practice: Network managers of our hosted Pressbooks networks are also invited to join a private group on our larger community forum which serves as a Community of Practice for users with this role. See the relevant guide chapter for more details.
Onboarding Checklist
Looking to start right away with setting up and maintaining your network? Follow our Network Manager Onboarding Checklist, which contains 7 steps to help you get oriented right away:
