Posted on

2014 NCSH Awards

certs
Click to enlarge

We attended the Annual Awards Banquet of the North Carolina Society of Historians in Mooresville, on October 25.

We won a Joe M. McLauren Newsletter award for the Alleghany Historical Genealogical Society newsletter we produce.

Our 2014 issue Emma Jean’s Blue Ridge Almanac also won Paul Green Multimedia Award. (The 2015 book will be available in November.)

Imaging Specialists, Inc. also redesigned the 14 NCSH award certificates and printed them, this year.

claire

Posted on

ISI Receives Awards at 72nd Annual Meeting of NC Society of Historians

The 72nd Annual Awards Ceremony of the North Carolina Society of Historians was held in Mooresville, Saturday, the 19th of October.

Out of 642 entries, 564 were declared eligible for judging and, of those, just 83 were declared winners. Eight of those (almost 10%) came home to Alleghany County!

From Imaging Specialists and Star Route Books, Four Brothers in Gray, the story of the Proffit family of Wilkes County, North Carolina, and their struggles in the Civil War.

Imaging Specialists won a Paul Green Multimedia Award  for our Trip to the Museum series, which we prepared for Alleghany Community Television. We also won a Joe McLaurin Newsletter Award for the AHGS Newsletter we publish and a Willie Parker Peace History Book Award for our book, Four Brothers in Gray.

The Historical Society‘s series, Alleghany Memories, won another Paul Green Award and for four episodes that featured members of the Walter Frank Osborne, Jr. Deatachment 1298 Marine Corps League, they won another.

The Tale of Clyde from Stratford Oaks Tales, 2013 NCSH Award Winner.

Dr. Suzanne Mellow-Irwin won a Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award for her book, Stratford Oaks Tales, The Tale of Clyde and Zach Hamm won for his illustrations. Imaging Specialists publishes the Stratford Oaks series.

Hannah Tucker also won a Joe McLaurin Newsletter Award for The Southern Tribune, a newsletter she produces for General JEB Stuart SCV Camp #1598

ISI also nominated others in surrounding counties. Writer, film director, and photographer Kelley St. Germain won for his Visions of Ashe: Mooshine documentary. It was developed for Skybest Television. The Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, partnering with the NC Arts Council, published the Blue Ridge Music Trails Guidebook, which won a Paul Green Multimedia Award. The Madison County Arts Council DVD, Four Master Fiddlers, also won. This program has also been broadcast on ACTV.

We couldn’t be more proud to have been associated with these projects!

Posted on

ISI Receives Awards from NCSH

If you came to the release party for Paths & Passages -Navigating the Blue Ridge and Stratford Oaks Tales, The Tale of Gretchen, you’ve heard our latest news. If you weren’t able to attend, here it is:

Imaging Specialists Inc - 2012 NCSH AwardsSaturday, the 20th, we traveled to Mooresville, NC for the annual awards banquet of the North Carolina Society of Historians. Imaging Specialists was well represented this year: Claire Halsey was awarded a Paul Jehu Barringer, Jr. & Sr. Award of Excellence for her genealogy work and Jeff Halsey was named the NCSH Historian of the Year!

ISI also received a Willie Parker Peace History Book Award for the latest book in our history series, Regimental History of the 61st NC Infantry (published last fall) about Alleghany County men in the Civil War. We gathered 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.

Suzanne Mellow Irwin and Zach Hamm, with their families, also attended the meeting and won awards for the first in their series of children’s books, The Stratford Oaks Tales. Zach received a Paul Green Multimedia Award for his artwork and Suzanne a Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award for the story.

A couple of projects of the Alleghany Historical-Genealogical Society also won awards. We were proud to accept awards for the newsletter- our fourth!- Joe M. McLaurin Newsletter Award and the Alleghany Historical Museum, which won an Evelina D. Miller Museum Award.

Elizabeth Bray Sherrill, President NCSH and Jeff Halsey NCSH 2012 Historian of the Year

Imaging Specialists publishes the AHGS quarterly newsletters. We also produce the books in the Stratford Oaks series.

We plan to submit several projects and nominate others others in our community for consideration in 2013.

If you know of other projects you think deserve recognition, nomination forms are located on the NCSH site.

Imaging Specialists and the Halsey family is proud to have accepted these honors from the North Carolina Society of Historians. We sincerely appreciate the consideration of President Elizabeth Sherrill, the NCSH Board and the Judges. And we appreciate the help and support of the Alleghany Historical-Genealogical Society.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Newsletter Award from North Carolina Society of Historians

October 23, 2010 members of the Alleghany Historical-Genealogical Society traveled to Mooresville to receive a Joe M. McLaurin Newsletter Award from the North Carolina Society of Historians at their annual awards banquet.

This marks the second consecutive year AHGS has won the award. This year NCSH received over 700 nominations and awarded 95 winners.

Third consecutive Joe M. McLaurin Newsletter Award for AHGS.
Third consecutive Joe M. McLaurin Newsletter Award for AHGS and Imaging Specialists.

Members representing Alleghany included President Roy Hunt, Board Member Pauline Jolly, and Jeff and Claire Halsey of Imaging Specialists, who produce the quarterly newsletter.

NCSH Judges’ Collective Comments of the newsletter:

“This newsletter was interesting from cover to cover. It contains eye-catching vintage and current photographs that draw the reader toward the text; has a fantastic layout and design; is nicely published; and serves its membership well. We could find no fault with this publication which is slated to receive recognition via the unanimous decision of this panel. We found it to be both professional and informative. Editor Halsey is doing a tremendous job in every avenue of the craft and should be highly commended for his work.”

For information about how Imaging Specialists can help make your award winning newsletter, call Jeff or Claire at 1-336-372-3002 or go to imagingspecialists.net/marketing