Catherine Chambers

It is not altogether clear whether Catherine Chambers believed in fate when it came to choosing her career as an in-plant manager.  As the director of Printing and Mail Services at Virginia Tech sees it, it just “kind of happened.”

When students in Virginia Tech’s architectural and design courses want to bind their final projects together in an elegant portfolio, they now have a place to go. Printing Services recently installed a Sterling Digibinder, from Spiel Associates—a self-adjusting perfect binder made to handle digitally printed pages.

As early as 1923, The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University recognized the benefit of having an in-house printing facility. However, several years ago, the shop found itself in a financial hole.

Since 1977, the Texas Association of College and University Printers (TACUP) conference has been bringing in-plants together from all over the Lone Star State. This year’s event will take place in San Antonio, from October 21-24, hosted by the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio.

To address the need for short-run, high-quality color work, Printing Services at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va., installed a Konica Minolta bizhub C6000 digital color press in one of its two production centers in July. Configured with an EFI Fiery 9.0 RIP and a Fiery Command Workstation, the device has already increased the in-plant’s productivity.

Over the past couple of years, there has been a noticeable increase in envelope printing at in-plants. The trend has been enabled by the availability of small digital envelope presses from companies like Xanté, PSI Engineering, Intoprint Technologies and OKI Data Americas. All of the devices use the same OKI print engine but offer different feeding options. These devices hit the market just as many in-plants' old offset duplicators were breaking down and their operators started retiring.

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