Frequently Asked Questions - CALI Lawbooks

What is CALI Lawbooks?

Built on the Open Textbook and Pressbooks plugins for Wordpress, CALI Lawbooks provides a robust platform that allows members of the CALI community to create their own law books including casebooks, textbooks, supplements, teaching guides, hornbooks, and monographs. The system uses an easy to learn browser-based editor for writing, allows for drag and drop organization of material and chapters, provides a fully functional web version of the book, and exports to a number of popular formats including PDF, EPUB, and MOBI.

How do I get started with CALI Lawbooks?

Make sure you have a valid CALI account.

Visit http://lawbooks.cali.org, scroll to the bottom and log in with your CALI account information.

Once logged in you are taken to your Lawbooks profile page. From here you can create your new book or manage existing books.

Before getting started take a few minutes to review the info on the profile page and add any additional information you'd like.

In the upper left under My Catalog select Add a New Book to create a new book.

Fill out the form to create a new book.

For the site domain, keep it short, letters and numbers, no spaces or special characters. We recommend something like lastnametopic to keep it simple and easy to type.

For site title feel free to use the full title of the book.

Set the privacy option to no while you are working on the book. You'll be able to change this later.

Hit the create site button to create the new book.

Your book is created and you are taken to the dashboard for the book, all ready for you to start adding content.

In the new book's dashboard click on Appearance and set the active theme to Open Textbooks if it isn't already set. Using the Open Textbook theme activates a number of useful features in Lawbooks.

Click on Text to open the Organize page and delete the sample content that was created

This will reduce confusion later

How do I add metadata to my Lawbook?

Once you've created a book we recommend that you take a few minutes to provide some basic information about the book by completing a couple of the settings pages. Adding this meta data to the book now will make it easy for people to find later.

Let's start with Book info:

Select Book info from the left hand menu.

Edit or add information about your book as you see fit. Fields include:

variations of the title

Author name(s)

Publisher info

Copyright & Licensing

You should select a Creative Commons license for your work. The Lawbooks platform is about open, so we like to host works that are freely available to the law school community.

Additional book and catalog information

Once you're done adding info, hit the save button at the top right.

How do I add a co-author, editor, contributor, etc. to my book?

CALI Lawbooks allows you to collaborate with people in various rolls while writing your book. The editor, author, contributor roles allow you to add people to help it the various aspects of creating your work. The subscriber role lets people in to read and comment on the work even if it has not been published yet.

To add a collaborator to your book follow these steps:

Make sure the person has an active CALI account. This is important since the system uses CALI accounts for log ins.

Have the person visit lawbooks.cali.org and login. This gets them into the Lawbooks system so you can add them to your book.

Make sure you have the email address associated with the account you are going to add to your site.

Login to your book and go to the dashboard.

Select "Users" and "Add New" from the left hand menu.

Under "Add Existing User" enter the person email address that is associated with their CALI account, select the role you would like them to have and click the button.

This sends an email to your new collaborator. They should click on the link in the email to activate the Lawbooks account.

Note the email may end up in a spam folder, so if it doesn't show up in a few minutes, make sure they check there.