Is your e-reserve seriously 75 pages? College considers limits on printing

Author: Polly Johnson and Alyson Bourne

Think about the e-reserve you printed last night, and then think about the last time you ever actually read an e-res. Now think about the last time you witnessed a first-year student printing out his or her entire semester's worth of e-reserve material, and you abandoning your own print job, which would lie in the printer and finally see its demise in the recycle bin. While this may seem like a small matter, multiply these situations by 2,300 students and then think about how much paper is printed in just one day.

We did some investigative research into the printing patterns at the New Library, interviewing professors, the Library and Information Services (LIS) staff and even librarians at other competing colleges, and discovered some very interesting information.

First, we came to the fairly obvious conclusion that there is excess printing taking place at Middlebury. Associate Dean of LIS David Donahue spoke to us about the printing patterns of the library. "We certainly have seen an increase in the amount of waste," he said. "Often times students will send a print job to the printer and go check to see if it is printing. Depending on what else is queued up ahead of that job, it may not be printing. When the student sees that it isn't printing, they send the job again or send it to a different printer. There are literally hundreds of wasted pages that are never picked up."

Associate Professor of Geology Peter Ryan said, "Back in the 80's and early 90's a lot of people thought that computers would cut down on paper use - e-mail instead of paper memos, etc. In reality, we now know that computers cause us to waste paper. It is very easy to just click 'print.'"

We did some research into printing patterns at competing liberal arts colleges to see how we compared, and realized just how lucky we are. At Amherst College, Head of Access Services Alexa Jaffurs told us that they "charge five cents a page for students and it gets billed to their student accounts; it's ten cents a page for the public. We don't lose money because the fees that go to paper and supplies are subsidized by the cost of printing. However, we don't make money off of what we charge." At Trinity College, as stated on their Web site, each student receives 125 free prints per semester. After hitting that limit, they are charged nine cents per print, with a discount given for printing double-sided.

With many of our competing colleges charging students for printing, is it only a matter of time before Middlebury begins to charge us? Stafford Professor of Public Policy, Political Science & Environmental Studies Chris Klyza said, "I think many of us agree that there is what we would consider excess printing on campus, and that the best way to address that is to somehow put a cost on printing."

The issue has been brought up on numerous occasions, even in Community Council. Donahue noted that last year the Council "took up the issue of printing on campus. This was the second time that Community Council had considered the issue. They made a recommendation to LIS to implement a print quota, a limit on pages per student per year, and to charge for pages over the limit. The quota set by Community Council was generous compared to other schools. At this point, LIS is working with that recommendation and developing a plan for how and when to implement such a system."

Until that point, Midd students will continue to have the luxury of printing however much they want whenever they want. In response to whether or not there has been a noticeable increase in the amount of paper being used this year, he said "the short answer is yes, there has been an increase in printing campus-wide and thus in paper consumption as well."

Considering Middlebury's dedication to environmental awareness, maybe it is time to consider how we're affecting our surroundings when we print the same assignment to four different printers solely for the sake of getting out of the library as quickly as possible. As Ryan said, "High gas costs cut down on driving, and I am sure that printing fees would cause people to think twice about printing materials that they may never use."