Join IPG Editor Bob Neubauer as he drives around central Pennsylvania, dropping in on in-plants along the way.
State college
These days, with the future of print being questioned so readily by digital know-it-alls, it’s kind of nice to hear about younger people who are choosing graphic arts careers. It shows that, even in the age of the iPad, some in the younger generation trust that printing will have a place in the digital world for a long time to come.
After its cancellation last year due to low registration numbers, the Association of College and University Printers (ACUP) conference was back with a vengeance this year. Attendees this year hailed from as far away as Australia, New Zealand and Scotland, and included managers from all over the U.S., from Oregon to New Hampshire, with a large contingent from Texas.
School Report Card Here's a list of the school district in-plants that participated in our survey, along with statistics about their operations. (L-Z below. A-K in "Part 1.") School District Full-time Part-time Budget
Penn State University State College, Pa. Penn State Document Services faces a problem common to in-plants that lack the right of first refusal. If a department or professor needs a print job and they expect it to cost less than $5,000, they don't need to get bids on it. "They can just go to the print shop down the street because it's on the way home or their cousin's best friend works there, or whatever," laments Michael Pierick, director of Document Services. "We have to compete for every job, so we need to be concerned that every product and service line we provide
School district in-plants print everything from tests to textbooks. Our exclusive survey and detailed in-plant profiles will teach you all you want to know. Our survey of school district in-plants pulled in an impressive 208 responses. The majority of these in-plants are small, single-person operations. Many of them combine graphic arts instruction and printing, sometimes using students to produce the schools' materials. We received 45 responses from in-plants that exist primarily as classrooms—21.6 percent of the total—but we opted not to include their data in our results so that we could focus on in-plants whose primary purpose is to print the materials that