Students may see changes in printing toward the end of the semester. Academic Computer Services is planning to run an experiment: Installing a printer in the Glenn G. Bartle Library’s Pods that could print double-sided pages.
Student suggestions sparked this initiative, said James Wolf, director of ACS.
“A student did a report last semester which suggested that this was something that we should explore to be environmentally friendly,” Wolf said.
ACS was also approached by ResCons, Pods employees, the Student Association and the Graduate Student Union.
The University prints approximately 9.5 million pages per academic year, a number which this initiative would reduce if carried out, Wolf said.
ACS hasn’t decided if the student page limit or price per page would be adjusted. But double-sided printing would at least be another option instead of a new standard, Wolf said.
“We will leave it up to the student,” Wolf said. “Right now you can print to two queues — ‘IC print’ and ‘color print’ — and the option of duplex printing would become the third.”
The experiment in the Information Commons would test whether such a printer could handle heavy student use. If these types of printers are prone to breaking, the cost of printing would increase instead of decreasing.
Whether this experiment is successful or not, ACS hopes to somehow improve printing in the future. The office is studying data from the fall semester on printing and is trying to find any patterns in printer use.
“We are seriously looking at the printing environment and how to make it better,” Wolf said.