recommendations for public webstation printers

[R124C41 at aol.com]

With regard to the response by Ilene Frank, Reference Dept.
Tampa Campus Library, LIB 122, University of South Florida, Tampa FL 33620
(ifrank at lib.usf.edu)....
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I agree that the present state of integration of all the various information
facilities is so poor that paper is required at this and that point.

But philosophically where we are heading is to make it possible never to let
information touch paper.  To do so is to suffer a productivity loss at a
minimum to be measured by the effort required to type the information back in
(or scan it, with all the imperfections that implies).

Thus, what I am suggesting is that whenever you see yourself helping people
to get their information to paper, the alarm bells should go off in your head
and you should immediately think "what is wrong here?  why are we doing
this?"

One may of course have to quickly retreat and accept the reality that we
aren't quite there yet in our philosophical and technological journey but
just to think in this mode is instructive.

--David Ritchie
--R124C41 at AOL.COM
--http://members.aol.com/RitchieDJ

P.S.  Yes, there are times when paper is better...but we need to choose to
put information on paper for those reasons rather than just letting it be the
default way of thinking.