Thank you very much to all those who replied to my query about
metering/vending printing systems. I had several replies requesting
summarized results, which follow:
I can't give you academic experience, but I use to work in a large public
library (41 branches). The biggest problem for the staff was the
vend-a-card. Many people would put there credit cards, etc, thinking these
would work. Also, even when the public used the correct debit card, they
OFTEN got jammed. We would try all different kinds of tricks to get them
out, but often failed. We would have to wait until the company came out to
fix it which was often two days. With only having a few print release
stations, this would cause problems in patrons being able to print...
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We have... terminated all non-law-student printing. Although there were
some problems with excessive printing and inappropriate printing, most of
those problems have been attributable to law students. The reason we
terminated printing service for other patrons was problems resulting from
corrupted and virus-laden discs (mostly from non-law-students) inserted
into the computers for either downloading or printing material. There may
be a means by which you can permit public patrons to print directly from
the computer, without permitting use of discs. If so, I would recommend
that.
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We've had a vended printing set up since about October 2002.
Essentially a user can buy a copy card, then swipe it on a card reader at
the printer station to pay for copies printed. Our primary hassle with it
is that it breaks down constantly (roughly once a month). The computer
loses contact with the server, jobs sent don't hit the queue, other
communication issues. Early on, we had users who couldn't understand how to
use the system but a set of written instructions at each station cured
that.
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We have operated a "pay for print" system here since the mid 1990's. We
have a mixed computing environment here for the students and public. There
are public PC's, which are used by our students and the general public, and
there is an access controlled compter lab that only students, faculty and
staff can enter. We decided to implement a pay for print system that could
read the debit cards that we had used with our photocopiers since the mid
1980's. We decided not to implement an account based system because we did
not want to have to maintain the accounts, so our system is strictly debit
card based and we sell the cards at the circulation desk. The need to
integrate the printing system with existing reader technology narrowed the
possiblities to only two printing system vendors. Based on prior
experience with the cards we also decided that we didn't want to make the
cards re-usable, so when acard is debited to zero it is discarded and the
patron buys a new one. We implemented the student lab and public printing
at the same time, with... The implementation of the
system met little resistance since we had no public printing available for
library patrons, and only had dot-matrix printing in the student lab. I
assume that if we had previously been providing free laser printing in
either location we would have had an outcry of protest.
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I would be very interested in what you find out since ours does not work
very well. Our non-law school patrons must either buy a copy card @$5
(with $3 worth of printing on it) or pay 25 cents a page on one copier
which takes money. Maybe something like that is about as good as anything.
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C. Andrew Larrick
Reference Librarian
Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia University
tel: (212) 854-3083
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:44:29 PST