Here’s what I just sent out today to all Middlebury students.
To Middlebury Students,
I’m writing with news about changes in student printing services that LIS offers. As reported in a recent CAMPUS article, starting in February of 2010, LIS will institute a new printing policy. This new policy provides students with an allotment of free prints. Once that allotment is exceeded, students will be charged for their prints. Based on our analysis of student printing habits, we are providing students with $25/semester, which will allow them to print 500 black and white pages, single-sided. Seniors will get $50/semester. Once their quota is exceeded, single-sided black and white prints will be
five cents per page, double-sided black and white prints will be four cents per side of page, color prints will be 25 cents per page, and posters (large format prints on our plotters) will be $1.50 per linear foot. We estimate, based on this fall semester’s usage data, that this new program will cost on average $15/semester for each student,
assuming that students continue to print at the rates that they did when printing was free. The money that we collect will be used to defray the material costs (paper, toner) of our printing program. These changes are being put in place both in reaction to the College’s new fiscal reality but also to reduce the amount of printing on campus for environmental reasons. Details about this program, including how you can add money to your account with a credit card, can be found at
https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/LIS/Student_Printing_and_Quotas.
In addition to this new program, you will now be able to print from your own computer to a library or lab printer. If the document you need to print is in Word, Excel, or PDF format, you can upload it from your laptop or desktop to a print queue via a web interface and then release it from the release stations, eliminating the step of having
to print it from a library or lab computer.
During the course of the spring semester, we plan to replace our existing printers with more reliable printers and to expand the options for color printing on campus.
Our Faculty Advisory Committee is working with faculty to explain to them the way this new program works and to encourage faculty to be aware of the printing demands of their courses.
If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to write to me or contact a member of the Student LIS Advisory Committee, whose members are listed at https://sites.middlebury.edu/lisadvisors/student-lis-advisory-group/ and who were essential in our efforts to shape a policy that was as fair as possible to students.
Sincerely,
Michael Roy