Students, faculty and staff may be paying for printing on campus after this semester.
The University is meeting with print management firms to look at variety of ways to reduce the cost and amount of printing, said Bruce Petryshak, Chief Information Officer.
‘We’re looking for a managing firm so we can pay for only what we use,’ Petryshak said. ‘Departments already pay for [paper, toner and ink]. Now they will pay per page.’
But until a firm is chosen, the costs per page are unavailable, Petryshak said.
‘The budget’s not good, and any cost reduction would be a good thing. Savings can go into other things more important for BGSU,’ he said.
David Kielmeyer, senior communications director, said they hope to implement some stage of the plan this semester.
The University is looking for possible managing firms to provide printing hardware on campus and be responsible for their maintenance. The firm would use the 900 networked-printers and 700 desktop-printers the University already has and safely recycle older machines not being used, he said.
Once a firm is picked, it will be important to do a pilot in some of the labs and offices on campus, said Deb Wells, director of ITS Client Services.
Wells’ office will be included in the pilot to gauge what kind of service and support they will receive from the managing firm, especially response times to fix down printers.
They hope to educate faculty and students about the environmental benefits and technology advantages of moving away from a heavily print-oriented culture as the plan nears implementation .
In one of the many computer labs on campus, Mitch Miller of the Technology and Resource Center works within feet of three printers where students are constantly picking up printed work.
‘If you stand here for 10 minutes, you can see we’re bleeding paper, and it’s killing us [campus lab system],’ Miller said.
‘It’s a cultural issue. Students and staff want to have something in front of them. That’s the way they work and I understand that. But we’ve got to do something to force a more electronic approach,’ he said.
‘Printing on campus has been on a sharp, steep climb,’ said Gwen Evans, coordinator of Library Information and Emerging Technologies. ‘We want to do something quickly to manage the waste being produced in campus labs, without disrupting student and faculty research.’
The first target of the planned program is to eliminate waste such as print jobs that aren’t even picked up by requiring card swiping or identification at the printer to release the job. The new systems may also let users choose which printer to use based on cost, Evans said.
‘In the library, we want to keep the capability of faculty and students to make a digital copy of the information they need, and we think moving from copying to scanning is a good way to do that. We charge for copying now and as of now, there is no plan to charge for scanning,’ she said.
BGSU is one of the last universities of its size nation-wide to still offer free printing, Evans said. The other ‘four corner’ schools-Ohio University, Miami, and Kent State-have all switched to charging for printing.
