| Pat Albanese (Pitkin) Gannett Professor Rochester Institute of Technology |
Matt Bernius Assistant Professor Rochester Institute of Technology |
Based in the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Print Media, the Open Publishing Lab (OPL) is a cross-disciplinary center that focuses on researching new methods of content creation and developing innovative applications to publish across various media.
The lab’s current projects center on the challenge of bringing digital content created by the various Web 2.0 applications back to print in an on demand, appropriately formatted and finished form. In this way, digital content can reside side by side with other traditional printed content (on a bookshelf, for example), but also take advantage of the enhanced user generated concepts of Web 2.0 capabilities (i.e., user-driven on demand content). The projects discussed during this session take the next step in completing the loop in the emerging publishing cycle. The transition from analog to digital technology is well embedded into this processes. The projects of the OPL explore the capability to take digital content back to analog and other digital formats but driven by the user generated principles of Web 2.0.
An example of this will be discussed under the project BookIt. This project uses wiki content and the shopping cart metaphor to output individually selected content and produce a finished PDF for publication across multiple channels, i.e. on-demand pushing streams or mobile devices.