Hello, fellow online learners and researchers! My name is Reed Hepler. I am the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the College of Southern Idaho. A few weeks ago, I published two LIS OER textbooks. One of them discusses Cataloging and the other discusses general Library Science. Many of you have looked at the books, which I am very grateful for. The next step is to use the books as a tool for discussion and collaborative improvement. This will give me direct feedback and also turn the books into a kind of never-ending workshop that allows real-time communication and discussion. Pressbooks, the host website, has a built-in communication and annotation service called Hypothesis.

Hypothesis is an open-source interface that lays over the website interface. You can comment, highlight, and annotate passages. Comments and replies can include images, code, LaTex, and other forms of data. You have to create a free account, but after that is done you can post to public and private groups. You can also create groups. This means that all librarians in a particular library can create their own comments or annotations without needing to look at public annotations or contributions from members outside the group. You can learn more about this tool here.

To access Hypothesis, click on the top or bottom squares on the top right corner of the book page. You can toggle highlights on or off with the “eye” button in the middle.

I hope that this will enable us to have increased access to knowledge regarding best practices in cataloging and library sciences and services. I did not create these textbooks to proclaim that I wrote the definitive textbook on cataloging. The goal is to make the information here accessible to anyone who needs it. Feel free to edit and adjust the textbooks as needed. Let me know what changes you make or would like to make so the books can become as accurate and thorough as possible.

Every time that you use this textbook, please contact me at [rhepler@csi.edu](mailto:rhepler@csi.edu) and provide the course title and the number of students involved. If you are using it for professional development, please give the institution and approximately how many people are going to use it at your institution. If you are a lone researcher, worker, or student, feel free to reach out and contact me with any revisions, questions, or other comments. This allows me to monitor the impact of the textbook and its associated assessments.