University Libraries Continue Offering Free Printing Services, within Limits

Beginning on the first day of fall semester classes, the University Libraries announced that we would continue to offer students and faculty “free” printing. A difference from past years is that users are limited to 1,000 “free pages” per semester. A page is the printing of one side of one sheet of paper.

When a person using our printing services reaches the 1,000 free pages limit, an electronic tally is kept and a charge of 5¢ per exposure over 1,000 is charged through the Bursar’s Office at the end of the semester.

Students and faculty may check personal print balances 24/7 by using the Check Print Balance link on the Libraries’ homepage, shown in the left column, www.bsu.edu/library. Similarly, there is a link prominently displayed at the bottom right of the Student Virtual Library page, www.bsu.edu/library/svl. The balance displayed is current through the previous day at midnight. Users with guest accounts can print up to 20 pages per day.

The 1,000 page “free” printing service is based upon data collected in the 2009-2010 time frame from 6.2 million pages printed by students and faculty. Of this printing, 97% fell under the 1,000 “free” page base. Allowing 1,000 pages may help to curb some past abuse of our printing service. Last spring semester, for example, ten students together printed 101,417 pages, with one of the students printing 54,279 pages.

Analysis of last fall’s printing data, published in the May 2009 issue of The Library Insider, revealed that seniors printed an average (mean) of 278 pages each, with 79.2% of senior students using the service. At the same time, graduate students printed an average of 446 pages each, with 62.8% of BSU’s graduate students using the service. Other classes of students printed fewer pages, on average. Word documents accounted for 36.4% of the printing, followed by PDFs (20.9%), PowerPoints (14.7%), and non-BSU Web pages (11.1%).

The University Libraries also provide students and faculty with access to more than 380 computer workstations, including 18 Mac units. The Libraries have 10 high-quality, fast laser printers that print documents from those workstations as well as wirelessly processed documents from personal laptops.

Bracken Library is open 120.5 hours weekly, with longer hours immediately before and during final exams. Between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009, Bracken was open 357 days to support academic achievement, research, and learning.

Libraries Provide Desktop and Wireless Printing Services for Students and Faculty

The University Libraries provide students and faculty with access to more than 380 computer workstations, including 18 Mac units. All of the popular productivity software used across campus are accessible at these workstations through a key server. The Libraries also provide access to almost 200 specialized, research-oriented, information e-resources including Academic Search Premier, LexisNexis Academic, Web of Science, as well as access to over 16,701 unique full-text e-journals.

Throughout the Libraries, the public workstations are always busy. One sees students working collaboratively in groups or individually on Word documents, creating PowerPoints, performing literature searches, viewing streaming video, videoconferencing, or performing a host of other coursework or research activities. Students can also be seen writing or reading e-mail and staying in contact with friends and family via instant messenger utilities.

A highly used service that we provide clientele is our printing capabilities. The Libraries have 10 laser printers that print documents from students, faculty, and others using the public workstations or submitting wireless print jobs from their personal laptops.

During the 257 day period from August 25, 2008 to May 8, 2009, which spans a few days more than the fall and spring semesters, the Libraries’ users printed 6,212,041 pages for an average of 24,171 pages per day. Of these, 16,748 persons printed 51.2% of the pages during fall semester 2008 and 16,011 persons printed 48.8% of them during spring semester 2009.

The interested reader can find data for fiscal year 2007-2008 published in The Library Insider 6(8): 2, 2008.

The accompanying table reveals the breakdown by user classification for each semester for persons printing documents in the Libraries. This percentage can be interpreted as the Libraries’ penetration into each user group for providing printing services. For example, during fall semester, 64% of Ball State’s freshmen students printed at least one page in the Libraries. As a whole, during fall semester, 75.5% of Ball State’s undergraduate students used the Libraries to print documents, and 62.8% of the university’s graduate students used the service.

The table also shows the average number of pages printed by user group for each semester. For example, among undergraduates, seniors printed the most pages each semester, 277.7 pages in the fall and 264.5 in the spring.
Analysis of the Type of Documents Printed

An analysis of the types of documents printed, as identified by the VendPrint Print Management Solution software, shows similar results for each semester. For fall semester, for example, the breakdown was as follows: Word (36.4%), PDFs (20.9%), PowerPoint (14.7%), non-BSU Web pages (11.1%), BSU Web pages (2.4%) Photo/Images (1.7%), Excel (1.1%), Publisher (0.5%), Miscellaneous (0.1), and Other (11.1%). The first seven of these categories account for 88.3% of the types of documents.

These data show that making it easy for students and faculty to print their documents in the Libraries is an important part of shaping their informational activities and enhancing their overall library experiences. The volume and types of documents printed suggest that the Libraries’ printing service is an important element for students’ and faculty’s research, teaching, academic achievement, and learning needs.