SPECIFICATIONS AND PRODUCTION
My Shutterfly Photo Book "Sabbatical Report"
Click here to view this photo book larger
When I returned home from Ireland in May, I reviewed the Sabbatical Leave Contract that I had received from our Vice President of Human Resources and paid close attention to the following in item 21:
“A written report summarizing sabbatical leave activities shall be completed and submitted to the Vice President for Human Resources, your Dean and the Texas Township Archives within sixty (60) calendar days of return from such leave. The report shall include:
Original Statement of Purpose;
Objectives accomplished and activities performed;
Conclusion drawn from activities;
A summary of the manner in which any of the Criteria for a Sabbatical Leave Proposals were addressed.
I was surprised to see that the report was due sixty days after the return from my leave. This surprised me because when a colleague went on sabbatical leave in Winter 2000 she submitted her report sixty days after she returned to teaching in the Fall not at the end of the Winter semester. Because of this I contacted HR for clarification and was told that the report is, indeed, due sixty days after the end of my sabbatical semester. Obviously the due date had changed – so I immediately got to work.
I had decided that creating my sabbatical report as a photo book would be an appropriate way to showcase my experiences as well as the reference photography I had taken and the artwork that I produced. I decided to use Shutterfly to create the photo book because it provided more layout options. I’m pretty satisfied with what I was able to do with the exception of the typography. When using Shutterfly it is not possible to adjust the width or length of text boxes, there is no option for leading, and there is no bold, italic or underline option. Although there is a “spell check” there’s no way to print the text in order to proof it. There is a “preview” mode that will bring the text up in a small box so you can read it on the screen but the text itself looks bitmapped in this “preview” mode.
After proofing the typography to the best of my ability I sent in my order on June 3rd for four copies of the sabbatical report, one for HR, one for my Dean, one for the college’s archives, and one for myself. I hope I will not be disappointed with the results.
There is a link under the photo above that will take readers of this blog to a slideshow of the completed report. It reads “Click here to view this photo book larger” this is not my choice of words – Shutterfly supplies code to copy and paste into blogs in order to post user’s photo books. That phrase is dictated by the code – so (please) excuse the awkward sentence structure. Although you can view the photo book, unfortunately, you won’t be able to read the copy in the report because of the scale of the pages but the photographs and artwork can be viewed relatively well. I will be posting the text of the report in a future blog entry.
Tags: Photo Book, Report Specifications, Sabbatical Report, Shutterfly
