[26848] in resnet
Re: eco-friendly computing labs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jamie Piperberg)
Thu Oct 13 10:18:47 2011
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Message-ID: <A5B6A418-2F36-4B03-AEBB-E6CE1FF2F0EA@bucknell.edu>
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:16:38 -0400
Reply-To: Resnet Forum <RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu>
From: Jamie Piperberg <jpiperbe@bucknell.edu>
To: RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu
In-Reply-To: <4E962C55.1080401@lehigh.edu>
We have several Canon iR 5050s as part of the lab area on the first floor of the library which is extremely heavily used. Last year we enabled Secure Print. The user experience is that when they print to the Canon, they are asked on the computer to enter a numeric code. (this can be anything from 123 to their SSN, to the first 27 digits of Pi, totally their choice). They then walk over to the printer, select their print job from the list, and enter the code they selected to get it to print. Seconds later they can pick up their paper, without having to rifle through someone else's printed out jobs or wait for a mountain of other jobs to finish printing. Print order is determined by the order in which they queue up at the printer, not which order they printed, so they can print, finish something up, log out of the computer and go get it at their convenience rather than leaving a logged in computer unattended while going to the printer
It reduced our paper use by 40%. The Canons, being able to get a break between print jobs have been jamming much less frequently as well (They jammed quite a bit before this). I honestly think that why the improvement was so staggering is that these (extremely common) situations completely stopped happening:
1:
Student prints paper for class in 15 minutes.
Student goes to printer, realizes it is jammed or otherwise out of service. Prints to a different printer without canceling the first job.
Tech Desk student unjams printer or replaces the toner cartridge a few minutes later. Student's paper prints out and goes into the recycling bin a couple hours later.
2:
Student prints paper without paying attention to what printer he/she is printing to.
Student goes to printer, does not find his/her job.
Student prints again.
Repeat step 2 and step 3 an unspecified number of times.
Student finally realizes they were printing to the wrong printer, and rather than going to that printer to retrieve their job, prints it to the printer they were expecting, or only picks up one of the copies of their paper, leaving the other(s) on the printer.
The unprinted jobs are cleared out a few times a day by the reference desk staff closest to the printing area and nothing immediately starts printing when we unjam the printers (now only a couple times a week instead of several times a day). I think we expected some paper saving, but never that much, and I never in a million years would have guessed that the reliability of the printers would have increased so dramatically.
The students weren't totally thrilled with it at first, and there have been some problems with the box asking for the code popping up behind the application so you have to click on it in the task bar to select your code, but the paper and labor savings have been fantastic. There were also early on a few instances where students put in an alphanumeric code, walked to the printer and found there was no way to type letters into the printer's interface and had to resend their job, but that passed pretty quickly, and everyone seems to have gotten the hang of it now.
The only downside is that there is no quick easy way to configure secure print on the Mac. We don't have a mac print server, (yet) but while I have gotten it to work on individual machines, I've had to install the driver for the canon (even though the generic postscript driver allows them to print) and manually go in to change the settings to use secure print, and manually save that as the default (this has to be done through the cups configuration page). There's no way to prevent it from being changed by the user for their print job. The windows machines all print though the print server, even on student personal machines, so they all have to use secure print, and this can be set up very quickly, so the mac users have been printing directly most of the time.
We haven't deployed this anywhere else on campus yet, and I don't think we'd see anywhere near as much reduction in waste in smaller areas with fewer printers, but it's great for the large lab with many printers if your printers support something like that.
Jamie Piperberg
Library and IT Support
Bucknell University
On Oct 12, 2011, at 8:09 PM, Stacey Kimmel-Smith wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm interested in finding out what other institutions are doing to make their existing public computing labs more green/environmentally friendly. From power saving techniques to reducing default margins on WORD software, making eco-friendly fonts available, whatever. Please share!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Stacey Kimmel-Smith
> Lehigh University
>
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