ITC hopes ’Printing Awareness Week’ will be a paper-saver

Staff Report

You’re using a terminal in one the University’s public computing labs and you come across a fascinating treatise on the diets of the 16th-century Northern Italian peasant class. Pressed for time, you decide to print it out, take it home and read it later. Click, click.

A few minutes later, you check the lab’s printer. E-mails, photos, a term paper … no Italian peasants. So you trudge back to your terminal and send it again. Click, click.

Five minutes later, voila! The treatise rolls out. You stuff it into your briefcase and head for home.

Ten minutes later, the second copy rolls out. It languishes on the tray for a few hours, then gets tossed in a recycling bin.

Unfortunately, it happens all the time. Information Technology and Communication supplies about a million sheets of paper to its computing labs each month, and a substantial percentage of that amount is lost to over-printing.

In an initiative conceived and promoted by students, ITC is designating the week of Nov. 12-18 as Printing Awareness Week. The goal: reduce paper waste and conserve resources. A secondary goal is to save users’ time and minimize their frustration by helping them better manage their printing.

Until now, it has been impossible for lab patrons to see what print jobs are in the printing “queue,” waiting to be processed. In order to help alleviate the problem, ITC is adding a new icon, resembling a tree, to the desktop of each computer in ITC’s labs. When preparing to print a document, a patron can simply click on the icon to check the status of the lab printer — whether it is operating, and how many jobs are already in the queue and how large they are. If the printer is already backed up, or not operating, the user can save the document and wait for a more convenient time to print, or ask a lab consultant for assistance.

Printing Awareness Week also will include a campaign to educate lab users about the environmental impact of over-printing, and how they can help by using the tree icons.

The week is the brainchild of students Chris Spiller, Sharon Kim, Travis Lynch, Ricky Moore and Howard Anderson, all part-time ITC computing lab managers. The idea “came out during one of our meetings,” says ITC’s Marty Peterman, their supervisor. “It was definitely a group effort on [the students’] part.”

Organizers plan to measure the impact of the printing awareness program by monitoring page counts from the lab printers in coming weeks and months. Down the road, ITC also has plans to modify the printers to allow them to print on both sides of the page, which should be another paper-saver.