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.
Popularity: 1% [?]
