LIS reports printing decrease under quota

Even as the newly implemented printing quota system has already reduced the use of printers across campus, students find themselves nearing the end of their free allowance of pages.

By making students pay for additional printing, the College seeks to cut down on waste and trim its budget however. Dean of Library and Information Services (LIS) Mike Roy said the College had planned to eliminate free printing before the financial crisis struck.

“This was something that we had tried to get going but there really wasn’t the political will to do this,” said Roy. “But once the financial crisis began, it became easier politically to just make the argument that we should do this.”

According to Roy, data are being gathered to review the new system at the semester’s end.

“We made our best good-faith effort based on last year’s data to try and come up with what was reasonable, and we’ll look at it again and might need to make some adjustments,” said Roy.

Despite the statistics, students widely disagree with the College forcing them to pay for mandatory readings.

“I print assigned readings, which are a lot because I am a IPE major,” commented Daniel Crepps ’12.

Crepps is one of many students who find that, with more than half of the semester to go, they have gone through more than half of their credit.

“I have $11 left, and I don’t print excessively, but when reading is assigned, I have to print it to avoid staring at a screen for hours on end,” says Crepps.

LIS worked closely with the Faculty LIS Advisory Committee (FLAC) and the Student LIS Advisory Committee (SLAC) to iron out the details of the system, such as how much credit each student should receive, and to try to integrate it into the college community with the greatest ease.

“The system is not going to be perfect the first time around,” said Pathik Root ’12, a member of the SLAC. “Any system has its flaws, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. We had to start somewhere. This is a process. Quotas can definitely change. Nothing is set in stone.”

Students and the SLAC continue to debate the use of e-reserves instead of course packs.

“We didn’t want to revert to course packs just because it would be a step backwards, especially for environmental concerns,” Root argued. “E-reserves gives students the flexibility to pay for a reading if they want to. With e-reserves, the copyright fees are taken up by the school, so students are only paying for the actual paper and ink.”

To help ease the burden on students, a push has also been made to get members of the faculty in tune with the new limitations. Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies Jason Mittell is a member of the FLAC and has tried educating faculty on alternative ways of conducting their classes.

“We sent out an all faculty e-mail in January explaining what the policy was, telling the faculty that they should be mindful of the policy and making some suggestions so that they can make active decisions, said Mittell, “I also co-ran a workshop on electronic grading.”

As part of the new system, students receive $25.00 per semester, except for seniors, who are given $50.00. Logs of data from last year showed that seniors printed about twice as much as other students and failed to show any strong trends with respect to printing habits among majors.

“It’s sort of like health care,” said Roy. “We wanted to cover 80 percent of the cost with students covering 20 percent of the cost and if we gave seniors the same quota we would have only covered for them about 40 percent of their cost.”

Different ideas have been considered regarding how to differentiate between majors and classes that require more amounts of reading.

“I think the credits should be allotted per course rather than per student,” suggests Daniel Schiraldi ’13. “I’m sure there are students who leave plenty of credit unused while others are struggling to stay under the limit.”

However, because Banner Web and Papercut, the printing software used by the college, are not in sync, the technology is not available to directly link a student’s academic status to his or her printing.

“We realized that it would be very complicated to differentiate between every major — the technology just wasn’t there,” said Root. “What would you do with first-years who haven’t declared majors? Or people who switch majors mid-semester or someone who just happens to have a lot of political science classes one semester? It’s tricky.”

Courtney Guillory ’11 said she believes the printing limitations are inconsistent with other policies on campus.

“The new printing system would make sense if the College didn’t require us to waste paper in so many other ways,” Guillory said. “All official forms, such as add/drop cards, require paper when that could easily be done over the Internet. The newspaper itself could be considered a waste of paper, but all of these things are considered fine. Then, when I need to print something out for class, I have to pay.”

Despite its flaws, the new printing system does come with its benefits. Due to less printing, printers will be more stable and break down much less than in the past.

“One of the hopes I have is that we can get new machines,” said Roy. “The lower volume will make them perform better but also getting a new fleet of printers will help out.”

Another benefit is that students can now send printing jobs to print stations directly from their laptops by typing in “go/papercut” into their browsers and logging in using their Middlebury username and password.

New changes are also on the horizon such as a system of “rollover credit,” a policy suggested by a student that would allow students to accumulate unused printing credit until he or she graduates. Soon, students will also be able to re-route printing jobs from one station to another.

“We wanted to make the changes in a way where there would be trade-offs so that some things would get easier although we had to pay,” said Root.

Any suggestions are welcome and should be submitted to the LIS suggestions page at http://blogs.middlebury.edu/lissuggestions/make-a-suggestion.