"The concept of the BOOC (Book as Open Online Content) came about during a conversation with Professor Melissa Terras (Vice Dean of Research, UCL Faculty of Arts and Humanities): she and Dr Rayner were discussing the progress of the AHRC/ British Library Academic Book of the Future Project in 2015, and talking about the need to try and try a more adventurous, practice-led approach as part of our investigations. It seemed important that the Project not only gathered research from our wide network of collaborative partners, but also attempted to grapple with the challenges the Academic Book of the Future raised: what, exactly, was a ‘research output’? What was a ‘book’? Could a ‘book’ be more fluid in terms of its content? How would peer review work – could it work? – with a less fixed set of traditional content?
As Melissa and Samantha talked about Open Access, and then onto MOOCs, and Dr Rayner outlined an idea of a multi-layered, ever evolving, online ‘book’, she suddenly said: ‘BOOC!’ Book as Open Online Content. It worked as a name, and meant that the closeness to the already familiar term ‘MOOC’ would help people to understand what it was trying to do."