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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