Tag Archives: print management

Student Printing Allotments to Roll-Over

Students…

I am writing with good news concerning your print quota.  Based on student feedback, we have decided that you will be able to roll over your print allowance from term to term until you graduate (or depart) from Middlebury.

This means that the amount you have in your account as of the end of May will be added to your fall quota.  A first year student who ends the spring term with $5 in her account will have $30 upon her arrival on campus for the fall semester.  A fourth-year student with $1 in his account will start the fall with $51.  For those attending Language Schools, you will see the roll-over appear in your summer allotment.

We hope this change to our policy will help make the new printing policy less expensive for you, as it will allow you to cover the costs of printing for a print-heavy year with savings you might enjoy in a year when you have less printing.

Best wishes,

Michael Roy
Dean of Library and Information Services

Print Management: Phase 1

Submitted by Ginny Bukowski

 

Between May 20 and May 27, Jeff Lahaie, Brian Foley, and Petar Mitrevshi will place print release stations in the following public printing locations:

   Main Library

   Armstrong Science Library

   Music Library

   Sunderland (computing labs)

   Munroe 214

   Axinn 105

   Robert A. Jones (basement)

As always, students, faculty, and staff will be able to print to any of these printers but will be required to release the job in order for it to print.  Guests will have to pay for their printing as of June 8 and will be limited to black and white printers in the Middlebury libraries.  Guests are people not in Active Directory and include, but are not limited to, regional visitors, potential students and their families, alumni, and dependents of staff and faculty.

 

We are aware of a few categories of people who are not in Active Directory (not active students, faculty, staff) or guests such as teaching assistants as well as Language Schools doctoral candidates and Language Schools’ week-long guests.  For the time being, they must print via local or departmental printers.  If you know of additional groups who fall into this category, please let Ginnie know.

 

Carol and Doreen are creating the cards and the accompanying internal accounting system.  LIS will sell guest printing cards to the college, who will sell them at the bookstore, MiddExpress, and Wilson Café.  Through these $5 cards guests will be able to create and maintain a PaperCut printing account.  Cards will be non-refundable.  They will have a warning that the guest should treat them like cash.  The college will not be responsible for them once sold.    For those of you at customer service points, you will receive complimentary cards for people who have legitimate grievances such poor printing quality.

 

Departmental guests will have the option to use the host department’s printer at no charge.  If there is a guest who is in need of a public printer for an extended time, the host department will need to purchase a card or cards for that individual.

 

Of course, your printing to departmental or local printers will not change because they are not public printers.

 

Mary, Linda, Elin, Joseph, Mike, and I are working on the various communications required.  An announcement by Mike to the college is imminent.

 

Of course, there will be an adjustment period for those who use public printers; we hope you agree that the reduction in wasted resources will make this stage worthwhile.  Your support and understanding, especially of those who interact with users of the printers, will be appreciated.

 

You may be wondering, “What about student quotas?”  Mike asked Jon Isham’s economics class to assess student quotas.  Once that information has been provided along with collected usage data, quotas will be discussed in Phase 3 over the fall term.  In the meantime, Phase 2 will be an assessment of release stations and guest printing.  Phase 2.5 will be what may be done for the non-Active Directory and non-guest categories.

Print Release Test Zone in Lib242

Submitted by Elin Waagen

LIS has undertaken a very ambitious project to implement print management for all public printers. Starting on Thursday 2/26 and ending on Friday 3/5 (1 week), LIS will test one aspect of the print management solution in the Main Library. We will create a testing zone which will entail temporarily installing two print release stations in LIB242. The purpose for creating this test zone is to evaluate the print release station in real world conditions. We will be asking users to provide feedback about the print release stations. We have created documentation and signage to assist our users with this temporary change. Internal testing found the print release stations intuitive and easy to use.
During our testing, please try out the new stations and provide your feedback.
If you experience problems or you are notified of problems with the print release stations during the testing, please direct them to the Helpdesk (x2200 or helpdesk@middlebury.edu). We will deal with the problems as quickly as possible.
If the printer goes to “sleep” between print jobs, users may need to press the big Green GO button on the printer.
The computers in 242 are dedicated to print release and cannot be used for other purposes during this test.
Printers without release stations will continue to be available on the 3rd floor of the Main Library (LIB303) or the lower level of the Main Library (LIB142).
Please direct all printing from walk-up stations to the upper and lower level printers.

What is a print release station? A print release station allows users (faculty, staff, students, and guests) to release their print jobs to the printers rather than use the current configuration of automatically printing jobs to the printers.

Why install a print release station? A print release station should reduce the number of unnecessary or duplicate print jobs from being printed, give the user greater control over their printing, and increase print availability.

How does a print release station work? When a user sends a document to the printer, it queues on the print release station. The user must log into the print release station using their Middlebury username and password to view jobs they submitted.
The user sees only the documents that they sent to the printer and they can release or cancel the print request.
During this test period guests can log in with the daily pclab username and password.

Print Management: Coming soon!

A group of folks from LIS and the rest of the College have been meeting to develop a plan for rolling out print management to campus this Spring. The system, which uses PaperCut to manage print jobs, initially will require people wanting to print to release their print jobs via a control panel. In the Fall we intend to begin issuing print quotas. After a quota has been reached, the person would need to pay for their print outs using a credit card. As the project moves forward, we’ll post more information.

This week we’ll be running a test print release station at circulation in the main library; come by and try it out!