Collaborative authoring, use, and maintenance of a multidisciplinary "e-textbook"

Abstract

A multidisciplinary textbook faces the challenge of satisfying the need for breadth, to represent all the disciplines that contribute to it, without compromising the need for depth, to treat each contributing discipline in a substantive way. We met this challenge in a text called "The Discipline of Organizing" with several innovations in book design. The key idea was to write the book as a "core" text with hundreds of supplemental endnotes tagged by discipline, effectively creating a family of related texts suitable for different courses and perspectives. This book architecture lends itself to implementation in ebook formats, and it also implies a clear path for evolving the book and ebooks over time. In this session the lead author and editor of the book describes the processes and principles needed to create, deploy, and maintain it.