Barbara Lindsay

As offset printing gives way to high-speed digital printing, your operators may need time to adjust and accept the changes. By Erik Cagle When Georgia Perimeter College installed an HP Indigo digital color press a year ago, a special training challenge lay ahead for Barbara Lindsay, assistant director of Printing Services. Among the offset press operators who needed to learn how to use the digital device was a 65-year-old man with limited computer experience. "Other than surfing the Web, he was not a computer user," Lindsay relates. "But he was courageous enough and interested in learning a new technology. Plus, he thought it would

One of the biggest challenges an in-plant can face is shifting to an all-digital workflow. But most of the time, say these managers, it's worth it. By Mike Llewellyn Over the course of his 30 years in printing, Dan Dore, operations supervisor at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), has seen it all. He was there for the rise of offset lithography. He saw the advent of digital printing. And now he's guiding his in-plant into an all-digital workflow. By the end of this year, all of the federally funded in-plant's offset equipment will be sent off to government surplus, and the shop

Variable data: Is it in your future? It better be, according to several speakers at the International Publishing Management Association conference. At the recent in-plant event in Atlanta, I listened to representatives from Heidelberg, Xerox and the Rochester Institute of Technology talk enthusiastically about variable data in their sessions, calling it a burning hot trend—a way to improve an organization's marketing efforts and generate more revenue. They pointed out the excellent response rates of personalized direct marketing pieces, showing chart after chart proving personalized printing is on the rise and is very effective. They made a good case. But they also left