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Brooklyn College Library & Academic IT | Library Guides | Creating Accessible OER | OER Guide for Faculty

OER and Publishing Platforms: Manifold

Discussion of the features offered by various web platforms useful for Open Educational Resources (OERs) and other types of publishing.

Links / Resources

Manifold Intro (copied from homepage)

Hosted by CUNY in collaboration with other partners, Manifold offers a way to publish public domain and open-access books on the web with supplemental resources and social annotation. Manifold is free and open source, and CUNY’s installation is available for use by all CUNY faculty, students, and staff..

Ideal Use: Instructors looking to create well-designed, customized versions of public domain or open access texts.

Pros:

  • Resources including audio, video, and interactive content can be embedded into texts.
  • Features include annotation, highlighting, and referencing associated documents.
  • Strong visual presentation and back-end interface display under continuous development.

Cons:

  • Requires a separate log-in.
  • Preparation of texts may be required to optimize appearance.
  • There are minimal editing features once books are imported, so changing content requires re-importing.

Examples / Screenshots

manifold project homepage view

Manifold Project Home Page

Manifold offers clean, enticing pages to introduce readers to a project.

manifold example shot

Better Online Reading

Manifold offers high-quality presentation and management of open-access materials for academic publishers. Here's one example of a Project Gutenberg text ingested into Manifold via ePub.

alt view manifold book

Reading a Manifold Book

Manifold incorporates images and a clean design into the flow of reading, though at the expense of the ability to easily add other design cues or embedded media in the text.

manifold backend view

Manifold Back-end Management

Manifold's clean admin interface offers a variety of options for rights management, collaboration, and publishing.

alt view manifold admin

"Makers" View in Manifold Admin

Here's another admin panel allowing for the search and inclusion of other makers, i.e. authors and collaborators.