Leah Kraus, IT&S Director of User Services, slammed a stack of over 650 printed pages down onto her desk in front of me.“This was printed from a student’s room last semester and never picked up,” she said, pointing to the huge stack of paper with the title “Price Line.com Annual Report” embossed onto the top sheet.

In a departmental study conducted from Nov. 16 to March 12, IT&S found that “13 percent of the student users printed 46 percent of all student pages…with two student users printing more than 3000 pages each,” said Director Rob Whitnell. Server upgrades allowed the department to monitor users and gave IT&S a basis for their new system quota.

“Each student receives a printing and copying allocation of 400 pages for each fall or spring semester and 200 pages for each summer in which he or she is registered.”

“I want to make sure that everyone knows that the services (copying/printing) are still free,” said Kraus. “This quota just ensures that each student is responsible for his or her own usage.”

In order to better facilitate these new measures, IT&S has embraced a new form of technology using what were initially referred to as FOB’s. What is a FOB exactly? “A FOB is actually the little pocket in your jeans above the regular pocket, but now it seems that ‘button’ may be the more popular term for these,” said Kraus.

Instead of using old faithful, the smart card, this new copier/printer system utilizes the student button. “The Smart Card copiers we previously had were difficult to maintain, the hardware piece that accepted the card on some machines didn’t work,” said Kraus. “Since the copy machines weren’t working, people were printing instead of copying. This created two issues: people needing to print, and taking advantage of the system, and people needing to copy and not being able to. This new printer/copier technology allows us to address both needs.”

Originally the FOB’s manufacturer was supposed to supply the college with one button for each student, including CCE students. However, due to back orders, the company could not meet the college’s original order.
Fortunately, this may have been to the department’s advantage.

Creating a first- come, first-serve atmosphere gives the faculty and student workers a smaller work load at an already over-burdened time of year.

Although IT&S has had complaints, some students, like sophomore Sarah Crane, are glad they work so hard. “The IT&S staff really helped me out last year when a had some problems with my computer…four different people came up to my room to help me fix it.”

“Without the help of the student workers, it would be impossible,” said Kraus, “I just want everyone to know how hard they have been working. All the credit needs to go to them.”

And busy they have been. After adding approximately 250 new computers to Bauman 201 and dealing with routine problems, the IT&S staff has trained every first-year student in a total of 22 sessions, each lasting one hour and a half.

“They (IT&S) have helped me out a lot. Without the training class, it would have taken me longer to learn about the system,” said first-year student Dominic Graham.