Looking for public printing solutions...

[Bennett, David]

>We're contemplating a set of new solutions to our public printing
>situation, and would like some input, and some pointers, if anybody 
knows
>of any...

     We recently installed UnipriNT here, and not a minute too soon.  
Patrons get to see how many pages are in a print job and what it will 
cost to print.  If they decide not to print, the job automatically gets 
deleted  (we get to specify how many minutes before the job expires).  

>To help with crowd control, we're also looking to staple jobs together 
(not
>difficult, just requires a serious enough printer) and print a banner 
page,
>or better still, print banner information (workstation and time) as a
>watermark on the first (and possibly subsequent) page(s).  

     All of our "crowd control" problems are gone because of two reasons. 
 
1. The system is easy to use, reliable, and SELF SERVE.
2. Students are more judicious in what they print or they download to 
disk.   We are also encouraging patrons to email articles to their 
account (available with our Proquest system).

     Although there is a lot of flexibility with respect to banner pages, 
we have dropped the banner page entirely.  After patrons use their card 
to release a job, it gets printed instantly and they can pick it up from 
the printer, which is on the same counter.  We have had no problems with 
jobs getting mixed up.  We also used to have jobs printed that never got 
picked up, but this doesn't happen anymore.

     We are primarily a Novell shop, but it was not too difficult to 
install NT Server (Uniprint runs on NT).  

******************************************************
David Bennett  (bennett at robert-morris.edu)
Systems Support & Instruction Librarian
Robert Morris College Library
881 Narrows Run Road
Moon Township, PA  15108
(412) 262-8474
(412) 262-4049 fax
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