Open Source Texts at the JMM Atlanta 2017

Here's a note from Kent Morrison of the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) that nicely synopsizes AIM's open source text activities at the recent Joint Mathematics Meeting in Atlanta earlier this month. It's a message to the authors that participated, but contains information to users of open source texts as well. Thanks Kent!

Thanks to all of you we had an incredible display of 20 different titles at the AIM booth last week in Atlanta. After the books were gone we realized we didn’t have a photo of the display—we’ll get one next year. But if you weren’t there you can be assured that it was pretty impressive. We also had almost constant traffic from attendees who wanted to know more or to tell us about the books they had used. A number of students stopped by to say that they used some of the books and liked them—not just for the price.

We managed to give all of the books away by the end of the meeting. Those taking the books were typically very grateful. We asked them to give the books serious consideration for course adoption and to pass them on to colleagues teaching the appropriate courses. One of the books is now in Rwanda, where the person who took it is teaching a short course this month in a place with almost no library. She plans to leave the book behind when she returns home.

During the meeting there was a lot more going on with open textbooks and more generally with open educational resources. The AIM textbook initiative was mentioned frequently. We have just begun work on a second NSF grant for the UTMOST project, and there is a closely related project with AIM involvement under the name “Curated Courses.” I invite you to look at the websites utmost.aimath.org and curatedcourses.org to see what we are up to.

Let me know when there are changes to the data about your book so that I can keep the web pages up to date.

We’ll be in San Diego next January. Hope to see you and your books there.

Best wishes,

Kent Morrison
American Institute of Mathematics