Preservation to Publisher: Flipping Textbooks Open Using the UND Scholarly Commons

In 2017, the Chester Fritz Library launched our institutional repository, the UND Scholarly Commons. Our first publication was an open access edition of The History of North Dakota, a widely used state history book that we purchased the rights to publish digitally. After receiving scans of the print book from the publisher, we created PDF, EPUB, and MOBI versions of the book and disseminated it widely across OER indexing platforms. We drew on this experience in 2023, when we partnered with North Dakota’s Department of Public Instruction to release digital editions of a series of textbooks about the culture and history of the Native American nations that share geography with the state. Similarly to our previous project, we were sent scans of each text to digitize and convert to multiple digital file formats. Upon project completion we published the textbooks on our repository and a wide variety of commercial platforms that allowed us toset the price to free. In this presentation I’ll be discussing the tools we used to create our digital texts, decisions made to meet best practices around accessibility, and how we maximized the reach of these works by disseminating them across both educational and commercial platforms.