[WEB4LIB] Printing charges

[Stephen Treger]

I have been very happy with our setup. We are using on the front end for 
the users to interface with Print Queue Manager 98 from ITC Systems ( 
www.itcsystems.com ). They sell turnkey solutions, or can fit into your 
existing setup.

For us we have a "onecard" with a online database from Diebold/Griffin. The 
ID cards have a mag stripe.

For printing, we have clients print to a Queue on a server. The pages for 
each print job are counted. To print, a user goes to a Print Station, with 
a printer attached to it - swipes their card and are presented with a list 
of print jobs, the cost for each job, total printing cost (if they choose 
to print multiple jobs at once), and current and final balance of their 
account.

After selected and money is deducted the jobs print out of the local 
printer. there are several of these setups throughout the campus. Some of 
the labs even share the Queues, so you could generate the print job in one 
lab then travel across campus to print and pay for it.

Additional features that we are not using allow a user to uniquely identify 
each job and optional password protect them. We just use a workstation ID 
and the patrons and left to identify jobs based on the workstation ID, 
time, and automatically obtained description.  Jobs are purged after 65 
minutes.


At 09:16 AM 4/13/00 -0700, Caroline Geer wrote:
>I really need your help!
>
>We will soon <read "hope to"> have a laser printer to network with our
>public computers in the Library.  We would like to identify who is
>requesting the print job and figure the cost so the requester can either
>okay the print or not after they know the cost.  We use student i.d. cards
>with barcodes which work for circulating books, using the cafeteria, or
>making purchases in the bookstore.  We would like to have the i.d. reader
>attached to each monitor, similar to the type of scanner at the grocery
>checkout or the pay-at-the-pump system.
>
>Does anyone have experience with a vendor that sells the software/hardware
>for handling this type of queuing for print jobs?  It would be ideal if the
>print request would come out with the person's name [at least] on either a
>cover sheet, indicating [ideally] also the number of pages and total cost,
>or the person's name on each page and the time/date of printing.
>
>Thanks for your help and advice!!
>
>Caroline Geer                                   Phone:  903.233.3271
>Coordinator of Information Resources    Fax:       903.233.3263
>Margaret Estes 
>Library                  URL:      http://www.letu.edu/academics/lrc
>LeTourneau University
>Longview, TX  75607-7001


__________________________________________________________
Stephen Treger, OS Analyst		| Phone:    619 594-5859
Malcolm A. Love Library, SDSU		| Fax:      619 594-8982
WWW http://fezzik.sdsu.edu		| mailto:treger at sdsu.edu
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