February 2008 — News
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Set It and Forget It: Bedford County's In House Disc Duplication
The district produces a CD each year for every child in the elementary grades that includes study materials for Virginia's Standards of Learning tests. At the end of the year, the students are asked to return the CDs to be reused the next year. "We're getting about 90 percent of them back," said Gosnell. "Then we make up the difference of any that don't come back."
During a new teacher orientation workshop earlier this year, Gosnell videotaped a school safety person who spoke about safety in the schools and how to prevent accidents. Using video editing software from Pinnacle Systems, he created a movie that he burned to a DVD. The district has provided that to all schools to show during their weekly teacher meetings so that all teachers would have access to the material. "There was no easy way to do this prior to having this ability," Gosnell explained. "The speaker would have had to travel to all 22 sites or we would have had to figure out how to get all teachers to a central location, which is well nigh impossible."
Now, Gosnell estimates, the district is producing between 5,000 and 6,000 discs. Most of that work he's doing himself, aided by his secretary. He estimates the cost at about $0.80 per CD and slightly more per DVD. A maintenance agreement with Rimage is $1,841 per year.
How Disc Duplication Works
As Gosnell described it, the machine works like this: The Rimage device has four slots for CDs. He fills three of slots with blanks CDs--about 300 discs total. One slot is empty. As a carousel rotates around, a robotic arm with a laser guide moves vertically up and down. As it comes down, it picks up disc and drops it into a CD burner drawer. After the first one is recorded, the drawer opens, the robotic arm picks it up and drops it into the next one drawer, which is where thermal printing is done. While it's printing that first disc, the arm picks up and drops another disc for burning. "It's burning one and printing another simultaneously," said Gosnell. "It keeps going like that in rotation until it completes the job."
To set up the recording job, Gosnell accesses a program on his computer to create a graphical label for the disc being created, copies the files that are going onto the medium for duplication, clicks the number of discs he wants, and lets the equipment do its job. On those occasions when he has more than a single batch of 300 discs to burn, he loads the system before he leaves for the day, sets it to recording and loads it again in the morning. The job will be completed by afternoon.
"In a matter of two to three days," he said, "I can run a complete job of 800 discs, which is fine for me.... We're not as concerned about speed as about quality."
