OPL

Now in its third year of development, the Open Publishing Lab in RIT’s School of Print Media has matured from an unknown lab in the old Kodak Approval room into a fully developed publishing ecosystem recognized internationally.  Employing a diverse team of faculty and students from across the RIT campus, members collaborate in creating the next generation of publishing platforms used to solve real life problems. With the quarter underway the lab hit the ground running looking for ways to improve some of its legacy projects and also add some new projects to increase its exposure.

The OPL’s Page2Pub project hopes to gather, unify, and print Web content by focusing on proper screen formatting, e-pub validation, smarter content gathering, and easier methods for cataloging metadata.  The Meetu Project (originally the social networking project) is looking ahead for ways to implement the project in a larger area with more success and hopes to integrate the project within the Inews project in order to foster a social network of content creation and editing.  The Open Publishing Guide project is looking to add more engaging content and to drive more users to its site.  The lab is also looking to redesign it’s site to represent its new outlook and wants to launch a new Open Application programming Intrerface project in order to simplify Job Definition Format and output specifications for the Web to print stream.

In the development of the lab the OPL has also hired two full time employees Rachael Gootnick, a Graphic Media Publishing graduate from the School of Print Media and Guy Paddock, a Software Engineering graduate from the College of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT.  When asked why they chose to stay with the OPL, Guy replied that he felt he had more freedom at the OPL then he would with other jobs based on co-op experience. He truly enjoyed the group of people he worked with.  He further expressed that he felt the lab was on the edge of what was happening in the publishing world.  Rachael stated that she enjoyed the work she was doing as an undergrad and saw the OPL as a way to continue work with self-publishing, while gaining more freedom in doing it.

Both Rachael and Guy agreed that working full time at the OPL is very different from their part time status during their undergraduate studies.  They both have experienced increased responsibilities and see themselves as acting as a communication channel between the directors and the students.  To date the OPL has won various grants and awards including: the HP Innovation Grant in July of 2008, the Sloan Research and Printing Grant in November of 2008, the Alumni Association Board of Directors Innovation & Creativity Center Award at Imagine RIT in May of 2009, the Romano Prize for Publishing Entrepreneurship in May 2009, and were finalist in the Knight New Challenge Grant. The OPL essentially has three goals (named The Three “E’s”): to Extend existing publishing platforms, to Enable new publishing products and business models, and to Empower individuals and communities to easily tell their stories as never before. With its third year looking to be its most impressive to date it seems these goals serve the OPL well.

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Recently Professor Michael Riordan spoke with RIT’s University News about the Open Publishing Lab (OPL) and the success of Innovation News at Imagine Festival. You can listen to a podcast of the interview by clicking on the link below.

Professor Riordan discusses Innovation News with RIT

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The Imagine RIT Innovation and Creativity Festival, held May 2, 2009, fostered the merge of the “left and right” brains stationed among the various colleges, ideologies, and disciplines within the RIT campus.  In the spirit of the festival, the RIT Alumni Association Board of Directors awarded four prizes of $1,000 each, including one given in memory of former College of Applied Science and Technology staff member Marge Ruffing, to exhibitions throughout the festival. One of the recipients was the School of Print Media’s Open Publishing Lab.  In order to be eligible for this award the exhibit had to show “major student involvement in the creation, development, and execution of the exhibit/project.”  With its major investment in undergraduate student research through its unique cross-disciplinary approach to solving real world problems, the OPL was immediately recognized for creating the next generation of cross publishing platforms.  The Open Publishing Lab was officially recognized for its “demonstration of the future of publishing through the creation of a personalized travel guide” through the software development of Page2Pub plugin, sponsored through a grant from HP Labs, which acts as a platform that collects content from a variety of online resources and transforms this information into a well formatted publication.  Along with their Page2Pub demonstration, the OPL presented the next update of the Open Publishing Guide, a research driven website that provides users with information on the process of self-publishing. The website is aimed at helping users research all aspects of self-publishing including book planning, creation, design and publishing. The OPL also ran four editions of Innovation News, a virtually instantaneous, cross media newspaper platform which facilitates the creation of new models for news publishing and event coverage and unveiled the next generation of its social networking game: Meetu, a game that allows players to physically interact with each other through the use of variable data printing and social computing.  The Co-Directors of the OPL are currently presenting information abroad at the Print/Pixel Conference in Rotterdam.  You can follow their “euro-tour” (including Frida Kalho and Casto) at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ritopl

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When: Thursday May 7, 2009
Where: Building 07 Room 1217
Topic: The O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference Recap – http://www.toccon.com/toc2009
Presenters: Abdulrhman Matsah, Guy Paddock, and John Karahalis

Popularity: 11% [?]