Kyle D. Skrinak

Submitted May 15, 2001, to R.I.T.

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From the abstract:

The graphic arts have undergone dramatic change in recent decades and promise to continue in this fashion after centuries (back to the time of Johannes Gutenbergi) of static technology. This change encompasses all aspects: commercial, technology, process and cultural. This has forced the consolidation of formally distinct disciplines, markets and industries into the patchwork department we now call “Pre-press” which refers to the processes necessary to render materials for the pressroom. Such disparate disciplines included typesetting, image reproduction, color reproduction, film assembly, (a.k.a., stripping) contract proof creation, plate making, paste-up and layout, and graphic design. The knowledge of one discipline allowed for some knowledge of other disciplines, it was not required. Their only commonality is that they occur before running a press.

Thus, the employee of such a department must meet a plethora of demands and skills and have access to the necessary support information in order to perform his job well. This aspect greatly inflates expectations on what management expects him to know and execute competently as well as on-going training and practices review. The response to this problem from management has been inconsistent. Some Prepress shops have a paper-based documentation system but such a system does not offer the superior advantages that a digitally based system can offer. The market response thus far has failed as well. There are very few (if any) “best practices” and knowledge management repositories systems available tailored to the needs to the Graphic Arts. These solutions have focused on “workflow technologies” which enable better integration across different Prepress equipment but do little to help the operators. As we have historically observed, addressing only technological aspects while ignoring human aspects

Given the now thoroughly digital-integrated Graphic Arts production environment, what remains is the use of a ubiquitous technology (such as “the Web”) as a supporting technology to deliver such a digitally based best practices and collaborative framework. This project will attempt to design and assemble such a web-based collaborative repository system.