Chambers

THE NATIONAL Government Publishing Association (NGPA) rounded up government in-plant managers from all parts of the country last month for the group’s 31st annual conference. The three-day event, held in Austin, Texas, was organized by NGPA Vice President Richard Beto, director of document services at the University of Texas-Austin; Robert Gomez, director of publishing for the Texas State Senate; and NGPA President Audrey Marrocco, print administrator for the Pennsylvania Department of General Services. Several dozen state and federal printing managers, along with a few of their state university counterparts, attended professional development sessions and toured the in-plants at the University of Texas and

What strikes me most about the non-profit in-plants in our cover story is how passionately they each believe in their parent organization's mission. As a result, their work in the in-plant has taken on new meaning—they're not just printing, they are helping their organization achieve its goals. And by doing this, they have become much more critical to the organization. This reminded me of a session I attended at the recent ACUP conference. Ray Chambers, CIO of Juniata College, told managers that many in-plants are closed down because an outside organization convinces upper management that printing is not the organization's core competency—in other

This year's meeting was a Major League event. One of the most well-attended ACUP conferences to date, it even drew three attendees from England. It was a conference where laughter was a scheduled event, foreign accents spiced up the air and cutthroat betting on autographed basketballs soared into the millions of dollars—all in a city known mostly for baseball bats and horse racing. With a louder than usual roar, the annual Association of College and University Printers (ACUP) conference landed in Louisville, Ky., recently, its record 150 attendees waking up the quiet Ohio River town. Dozens of new schools were represented this