The second edition of Variational Principles in Classical Mechanics was released in August 2018. This Open Educational Resources (OER) was created by Douglas Cline, Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester, with the support of Joe Easterly of the Digital Scholarship Lab.
History
This project started when Professor Cline recognzied that physics textbooks were expensive and often did not cover the range of topics he addressed in his course. He started expanding his own lecture notes, eventually sharing slides and notes with students. With the advent of on demand printing and the ease of making PDFs widely accessible, creating an OER was the logical next step.
Collaboration across RCL
A number of units across River Campus Libraries came together in support of this project. Science and Engineering Outreach librarian Morianna Garcia was initially contacted by Professor Cline. Jason Harvey (Science and Engineering Outreach Librarian) and Zary Kamarei (Somerville Director of Science and Engineering Libraries) joined Morianna and Joe Easterly (DSL) in providing support for the project. Metadata Services contributed the catalog records. Collections helped to manage on-demand print book sales through Amazon.com, and Outreach, Learning & Research services helped ensure the title would be listed in a number of OER repositories. Joe Easterly of the Digital Scholarship Lab designed the book cover, completed a pre-flight of the text and images, designed the website, and set up the listing for the book through print-on-demand service CreateSpace.com.
Impact
The PDF of the first edition has been downloaded over 900 times and has been adopted at a number of universities around the world including Rutgers University and The University of California, Berkeley.
License
Variational Principles in Classical Mechanics by Douglas Cline is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), except where otherwise noted. Illustrations by Meghan Sarkis. Book and web design by Joe Easterly.