University To Print Exam. Papers

Press, Issue 31095, 25 June 1966, Page 14

University To Print Exam. Papers

The University of Canterbury will produce almost all its examination papers this year in its own printing department—cheaper, faster and with considerable time saved.

The job will be cheaper because the university will do it at cost, using its own staff and machines.

It will be faster because an offset process will take copies from examiners’ manuscripts and thus eliminate setting up type, printing proofs, and having them corrected and rechecked. The weeks saved will enable examiners to set papers as late as August, instead of June. This will be appreciated by academic staff, who prefer to set papers near the end of a course instead of in the middle. The university information officer (Mr E. T. Beardsley)

said more than 500 sets of examination papers would be prepared completely within the university, which would accept full responsibility. The only papers to be printed elsewhere would be those requiring special symbols not readily available on typewriters.

For a year the university printing department had been developing rapidly. “Like the computer, it generates its own work as staff realise its possibilities,” said Mr Beardsley. The department now had two printers, a varitype operator using a machine which set material.in columns, and two girls on conventional duplicating. It had two offset presses, a plate-making camera, a stapler, folder, and guillotine plus a line-up table on which material was laid out precisely before reproduction.

Mr Beardsley said the department was now printing teaching material for all faculties of the university, including photo-copies of references where books were short.

Job printing for the administrative departments included forms, letterheads and envelopes. Special jobs, said Mr Beardsley, included the monthly university “Chronlicle” for staff and graduates, brochures, and the 100-page (design report and plans for (the third stage of the university at Ham.