GoPrint: cutting waste?

Library and Information Services has announced that GoPrint, the newly implemented system designed to regulate printing, has already decreased paper waste. However, these claims may be derived from questionable data.

In a Feb. 15 e-mail to the Luther Community, LIS pointed out that students have only used 33 percent of their allotted printing quota, and the LIS Web site uses this fact as proof of GoPrint’s success. However, this does not compare the actual amount of paper used during the pre-GoPrint era. Simply put, the number has no context for comparison.

LIS’s GoPrint Fall 2009 Report may also be skewed with questionable numbers. The report claims that Luther students printed exactly 1.2 million pages during the 2008-2009 school year, and that this year’s pace is only two-thirds of that number. Yet 1.2 million is not the actual number of pages printed.

“We kind of go off of anecdotal evidence,” User Services Help Desk Leader Matt Hughes said. “We first turned on GoPrint in January 2009 and started logging data. So for fall 2009 we just had to go off of paper ordered. That’s one of the weak elements of our data.”

Hughes is in charge of ordering paper for the Luther campus and has been the chief overseer of GoPrint’s implementation.

Further in the report, LIS admits that there is no way to actually compare the amount of paper used in the fall of 2009 to the fall of 2008 because LIS didn’t track paper two years ago.

“That [statement on the Web site] shouldn’t be construed to mean that we’ve used significantly less,” Hughes said. “We won’t be able to tell how effective GoPrint has been until next year sometime. I was in charge of the paper supply, so we ordered less this fall. It leads me to think we’re using a lot less.”

Whether GoPrint is responsible for a sizable decrease in paper waste remains to be seen.

In the meantime, some students, like Luther senior Ari Zink (‘10), are unhappy with other elements of GoPrint.

“I hadn’t used all of my GoPrint money, so I thought that it would just go into my [GoPrint] account for this semester, but it didn’t,” Zink said. “It just disappeared.”

Zink’s frustration is common on campus. If students do not use their allotted dollar amount during the semester, the remaining money is given to LIS and not rolled over into the student’s GoPrint account the following semester.

Hughes doesn’t interpret this as incentive for students to print more.

“That’s just the way the technology fee is handled,” Hughes said. “It’s used on new technology for the school. I’m really happy we haven’t seen students, knowing they aren’t getting that money back, just printing off the rest of their quota at the end of the semester.”

But students question the fairness of the system for majors that require more heavy printing like English, Anthropology or Communication Studies majors.

“I’m a Health major, so I don’t have to do a ton of printing, but it doesn’t seem fair for majors like English or Communication Studies,” Ally Moen (‘11) said.

Hughes is unsure of plans to change the GoPrint policy in the future.

“It’s hard to do [a discriminating allotment] with this system,” Hughes said. “We want to try the flat fee across the board for at least a year. Some other schools do a certain quota per class. It all goes into one big pot, and we haven’t denied any requests for a bigger quota. So I think it’s fair.”