Behind the Scenes: The Parkland Print Shop

If an instructor mentions the Print Shop in class, it strikes curiosity in some students. Previously unaware of this part of Parkland College, many wonder what exactly they do. It is a department tucked in the back of Parkland's X Wing that provides various printing jobs for the college. If there is a poster for an upcoming event at Parkland College posted on a bulletin board, odds are that the Print Shop is responsible. Spanning back in time to the very beginning of the college, the department has been an important aid to Parkland and its faculty.

"We're a full service shop and we provide value to the faculty and staff," said Dave Weckhorst, the manager of the Print Stop. "We do anything as simple as a test to as complicated as what we call a mail merge, where we can do variable print data and so forth. And we can help market the college through things such as posters."

The Print Shop exists to exclusively serve Parkland, printing only in-house for the college. Whether an instructor needs a couple of work sheets for a homework assignment or if the college needs a large amount of course catalogues for the next semester, the Print Shop has the job covered. "We do anything from tests, syllabus, marketing material, college catalogs, posters, to mailings," said Weckhorst.

Sitting in the Print Shop is a variety of different equipment responsible for providing any printing job that the college may need for printing specifically, there are three pieces of production equipment: two designed for black and white printing and one for color. In addition, there are many different kinds of equipment for binding paper together. The Print Shop can bind paper in ways such as comb-bounding, tape-bounding, and perfect-bounding. Also, there is equipment on hand for cutting and folding. "Everybody is trained to run all of the equipment," Weckhorst explained.

The staff of the Print Shop is fairly small. Along with Weckhorst, the workforce behind the department consists only of one full-time employee, one part-time, and two student workers. One of these student workers is Michael Hoke, who juggles his class work with twenty hour work weeks at the Print Shop. "When there's work, you work. When there isn't, you study," Hoke commented with a laugh. "I'm responsible for taking print jobs to the offices and printing them out, as well as binding and spiraling catalogues. I learn all sorts of new stuff; I like that."

The Print Shop is located in room X142 near the radio station 88.7 WPCD and the TV station PCTV. The small staff works to serve the college and its faculty by printing anything that is needed. Whether you need catalogues, quizzes, or posters, the Parkland Print shop has you covered.