Joe wrote:

>I would think that 2 printers and only 1 terminal to control printing from 90
>PCs wouldn't be enough and that there would be a line at the PC almost all of
>the time.  Hasn't this been a problem?

Keep in mind that the PC's in the UW-Madison Memorial Library Infolab are
predominantly used for class work (word processing, graph/presentation
software, internet searching, assorted classwork-related software) and
checking email.  I've never seen more than four people in line at a time,
and that's always been when someone is monopolizing one of the printers with
a long printing job or a mistake of some sort.  But I don't know how this
would work for PC's that are used mostly for searching OPACs/databases/the
internet, if that's what the original poster was asking about.  Perhaps
people would need to print more often for these purposes, but for 24 PC's
(wasn't that the amount that the original poster wrote about?),  I think two
printers would probably be more than sufficient even for PC's used for
library searching rather than classwork.  (A printing job can sit in the
queue all day if a student worker or librarian doesn't monitor and delete
it, so a student could send a dozen small printing jobs to the printer, then
come print them all out at once when [s]he finishes searching.)

I suspect the most noticeable change would be less paper wastage and more
students actually thinking about what they want to print before they do so,
since they'd be paying for it.  The second most noticeable change would
be...people complaining that they have to pay for their prints.  Which
they'd do no matter what vendacard setup you had.  At least this way, you
don't have to have printers, vendacards, and switchboxes scattered all over
the room.

Jennifer Friedman

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    _---_       Jennifer Friedman      WIPRO Librarian      BayMoo, IPLMoo:

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   (_)-(_)      jennifer@mailbag.com   drjoe@mailbag.com

            http://www.mailbag.com/users/jennifer/jennifer.index.html

            Purveyor of information services.  All-around people person.

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