The Lantern

Issue date: 10/29/07 Section: Campus

Scores of Ohio State students made the trek to the John A. Prior Health Sciences Library for a simple reason: free printing.

They came in droves, printing an average of 30,000 pages per day on the library's four printers. It cost the library about $1,000 each week, said Norbert Hebrank, a computer lab manager for library services and Center for Knowledge Management.

Because of cost, it is finished - no more unlimited free printing at Prior Library.

"We tried to do (free printing) as long as we possibly could ... It is certainly not a decision we took lightly," Hebrank said.

At 10 cents a page to print in most places around campus, Prior Library's new rate of 6 cents is still a good deal.

"We're not making any money out of it," he said. "It's strictly to maintain it."

Prior Library was a haven for students who needed heavy printing.

"That became one of our problems," Hebrank said. "(Prior Library was), if not the only place left at Ohio State ... certainly one of the very few."

Bryan Moser, a senior in fisheries science, works as one of Prior's computer lab monitors and said he faced complaints from students the first two weeks of the quarter.

"People come a long way expecting free printing," Moser said. "They say they are already paying so much for education."

Prior Library, aimed mostly at medical students, established a computer lab three years ago. Hebrank said free printing has been around since he started working two years ago.

"We have been talking about this the entire time I was here," he said.

With so much printing being done in one lab, the library was forced to consider cost and trying to maintain the lab. Going through about $1,000 per week for paper, which does not include overhead labor cost, the library could no longer shoulder the upkeep of free printing.

"We were using six boxes of paper a day," Hebrank said. "That's 5,000 sheets per box."

Because it was unlimited printing, between 10 to 20 percent of the paper ended up being wasted because many students did not pick up their print jobs.

Even so, there are still disgruntled students unhappy with the new arrangements.

Caroline Haas, a graduate student in biomedical engineering, uses Prior Library for her printing.

"Most classes use Carmen or an online media where things need to be printed out," Haas said. "It's an inconvenience to take away free printing."

Although free printing is gone, students are still making their way to Prior Library.

"The decrease in traffic is nowhere near the actual decrease in printing that we've seen," Hebrank said. "We're at about 75 percent of the traffic we were before (for printing)."

Natalia Mitsui can be reached at mitsui.6@osu.edu.

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