SAN LUIS OBISPO – Cal Poly’s Graphic Communication Department has been selected to participate as part of an international consortium of digital publishing groups to study and advance the cause of digital publishing throughout the world. Developed by the Hewlett-Packard Corporation and called the HP Digital Publishing University Community (DPUC), the consortium includes California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo; Ecoles Polytechniques Fédérales, Switzerland; Moscow State University of Printing Arts; Peking University, PUCRS (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul); Purdue University, Indiana; Rochester Institute of Technology, New York; University La Rochelle, France; University of Bologna, Italy; University of Nottingham, United Kingdom; and the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. Representatives of HP are also members of the consortium. Lorraine Donegan, a professor in Cal Poly’s Graphic Communication Department, recently attended a meeting of the DPUC at the University of Nottingham, and professor Brian Lawler will attend a meeting later this fall in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Cal Poly’s Graphic Communication Department will also be part of a meeting scheduled for spring 2007 at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez. According to Donegan, the purpose of the Nottingham meeting was to identify digital publishing needs and problems within the graphic communication industry, establish a shared understanding of participants’ interests and a direction for their work in exploring new digital publishing applications, and to establish a means for creating relationships and linkages for collaboration to further technology and advantages in digital publishing. The meeting included presentations on photo sharing and meta-tags using GPS technologies; hybrid Intelligence Artifact Recognition; Component Object Graphics (COG), which partitions each item on a PDF page and individually describes each of them with code; XSLT (a language that transforms XML); Wiki (computer language); The Gelato group (www.gelato.org); user interface testing and implementation; modular and flexible documents for VDP; and dependability of output. Donegan gave a presentation at the meeting on digital content management as it relates to digital publishing and how Cal Poly’s Graphic Communication Department can contribute to the DPUC initiatives. She discussed Cal Poly’s learn-by-doing philosophy and hands-on technology. “Years of practical laboratory applications enable us to evaluate and test the abilities of digital publishing compared to more traditional means of printing such as offset lithography. Because of our history, dating from the beginning of digital applications for publishing, we are able to bring a new understanding of commercial printing to many of the group’s researchers and computer scientists.” Harvey Levenson, head of Cal Poly’s Graphic Communication Department, says that participation in HP’s DPUC is another opportunity for Cal Poly to help strengthen the digital printing industry through collaboration among some of the best universities and critical thinkers in the field. “HP is to be commended for partnering with education in such a way that will benefit all those concerned with the growth and development of digital printing,” Levenson said. Donegan says that some of the areas that the DPUC will be focusing on in the future include multi-channel publishing -- publishing to different media--including PDA, Web, print, e-mail; creating a “multi-channel space” for digital publishing; repurposing data; variable data publishing; flexibility and extensibility of variable data/content documents; DDF (document description framework) -- an encapsulated document format containing both data and program; and XML, the key to the tagging.