To the Editors:

This is a summary of CIT’s reasoning and decision process about the new charges for printing in the public computer labs.

Much more detailed information can be found at CIT’s web pages, available at: http://www.oberlin.edu/cit.

I encourage anyone who is interested in this subject to read that information.

Not surprisingly, we have received some complaints about this new process. But we have also received comments of support.

The new policies and charges were put into place to do two things:

1) Promote more conservative use of printing and thus reduce the large amount of waste that we have experienced in the labs.

2) Offset some of the increased prices in paper, toner cartridges and printers. This will also allow us to resume the use of recycled paper in the public labs, which costs significantly more than non-recycled paper.

We are quite aware that this new policy will place additional financial demands on some students, especially those who are enrolled in courses that have intensive reading requirements and high volumes of ERes and/or Blackboard documents. But we also think that the fees and the allowance that we have established are reasonable and modest.

As most observant users of our public printers will attest, paper waste has gotten way out of hand.

Last semester, we went through over 1,047,000 sheets of paper. Evidence of waste was everywhere. Along with the rising costs of paper, toner and printer maintenance, the high volume of printing has forced us to enforce these new policies.

The wonderful convenience and opportunities of online materials (e.g. ERes, Blackboard, other web sources) have been coupled with new challenges. The greatly increased use of printing is one of those challenges. But there are ways that students can regulate how much they print.

For example, not all ERes documents have to be printed and most of them are available in hard copy form for check out from the Mudd Reserve Room.

I fully acknowledge that it is difficult to read large documents from a computer screen and I also know that students are sometimes requested to bring hard copies of reserved reading materials to class.

Nevertheless, there surely are ways for students to conserve their use of printing.

In CIT, we take very seriously our responsibilities to serve the students. Especially in these challenging times of reduced budgets, we have carefully considered the balance between our resources and the services we offer. The decision to enact these new policies was done with that in mind.

As always, I welcome further discussion of this issue.

—John Bucher Director of Information Technology