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ISI Wins 2011 Publishers Award from NC Society of Historians

Imaging Specialists has won a prestigious Garland P. Stout Publishers Award for excellence in the field of publishing from the North Carolina Society of Historians. This is the second Publishing Award for ISI. We received the first one in 2009 for our work in Alleghany County’s Sesquicentennial.

Regimental History of the 26th North Carolina. Cover Painting of Picketts charge by Edwin Forbes at US Library of Congress.
Regimental History of the 26th North Carolina. Cover Painting of Picketts charge by Edwin Forbes at US Library of Congress.

The Society also honored us with a Willie Parker Peace History Book Awardfor the book, Regimental History of the 26th NC Infantry, that we produced this summer, about Ashe County men in the Civil War. We gathered the text, photos, battle maps and battle summaries for the book; laid out and re-set the text; and optimized the photos for the book which is now available on-demand from Star Route Books and in our shop in Sparta.

We were also fortunate to receive a Robert Bruce Cooke Family History Book Award for our own, Family Photos – Eli Hamilton Halsey and Lillian Blanche Smith. This book is a photographic record of our own family, developed with the help of my Dad, Ronald Halsey’s, archive of negatives and our family’s photos. We scanned all images and assembled them into a chronological record of the lives of my Great-Grandparents and their family. The casebound book is printed in color and includes images from old prints, tintypes, 4×5 negatives, 35 mm and digital photography.

It is true that this “labor-of-love” will never have mass-appeal, but it was a real learning experience for us in the field of on-demand, self-publishing and we couldn’t be more proud of the result.

We also share in an award the Society presented to the Alleghany Historical – Genealogical Society. For the third year, AHGS has won a Joe M. McLaurin Newsletter Award, for the quarterly newsletter that we produce. The newsletter regularly includes text and historic photography from the county and this year, we’ve started adding our own photos of the Alleghany Historical Museum’s loans and acquisitions.

And we are proud to have played a part in the projects of Kay Bodeen, who received a Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award for Pat Crisp – Like a Moth to the Flame (proofreading and photo prep) and Thelma Davis’, Paul Green Multi Media Award for Alleghany Methodist Episcopal Church Quarterly Conference Records (We generated PDFs for DVDs), both award winners, this year.

We are also pleased to have helped Lorene Sturgill, who received a Robert Bruce Cooke Family History Book Award for Descendants of William Black and Nancy Allison (We helped with photographic scanning, typesetting, page layout, design and production). This 296-page, casebound book containing genealogical records, photographs and stories is arguably our largest book project yet.

Of course, ISI has generated film for thousands of titles over the years, including many family histories and multi-volume sets, but this is the largest in which we’ve handled all aspects of the prepress work from design to production. The book is also available, on-demand from Star Route Books and the Sparta Store.

Congratulations Lorene, Kay, and Thelma for the recognition of your work and thanks for letting us be a part of your projects.

October of 2007, Old Orchard Blueberry Farm. © Imaging Specialists, Inc.

Lastly, we are happy to have played a part in the joint project of the Alleghany Historical – Genealogical Society and the Sparta Revitalization Committee‘s downtown Sparta walking tour, The Story of Sparta.

Window Decals designed and printed by ISI for the Sparta Revitalization Committee's historic Walking Tour
Window Decals designed and printed by ISI for the Sparta Revitalization Committee

We originally designed the SRC’s logo and were able to incorporate it into the vinyl, window decals for the self-guided tour. We are also pleased to have provided the cover photography for the Hospice’s Meals and Memories cookbook. Both projects won Paul Green Multimedia awards.