Even in this digital age, Student Printing is a heavily used service at Emory. Annually, our student body prints over 3.5 million pages on almost 2.5 million sheets of paper. This is currently done on 39 printers and 15 multi-function devices that allow for printing, copying, and scanning (and 1 that allows for faxing). You can see in the graph below that there has been a steady demand for printing over the past few years with no significant decline.
Since 2008, the Student Printing service at Emory has been centrally managed by LITS Student Digital Life (SDL), with departmental customers providing their own hardware (i.e. printers, release stations, print server, active network jacks, etc.). Departments were also required to pay for their use of both the Pharos UniPrint and EmoryCard site licenses.
With hardware replacement cycles being different in the various departments, the student printing experience has not been the same across campus. To solve this dilemma, the LITS Student Digital Life team began partnering with customers in August 2014 to move ownership of all devices, support, and costs from the local department to SDL. As part of this effort we have been able to replace aging printers with new models, move underutilized printers to higher traffic areas, and even set up new print stations within departments that could not afford to do so on their own.
To date we have been able to consolidate over 75% of the student printing locations to SDL and on June 1, 2015 we will be launching the next evolution of the Student Printing service: EaglePrint.
EaglePrint will allow for a number of new changes and features. Instead of requiring students to download and install a new printer installer for each location they plan to use, EaglePrint will have a single printer installer that will work for all EaglePrint locations. We will be able to simplify the user experience at the print stations by allowing them to logon by simply swiping their EmoryCard to see their submitted jobs. And as mentioned before, we will be able to expand into new areas of campus that had previously not offered printing due to the associated costs.
Our biggest new addition will be offering printing in each freshmen residence complex beginning in August 2015. This has been our most requested service in responses from our annual Student Technology Survey. And by marketing this to incoming students they will know that they do not have to bring their own personal printer to be able to print in their building.
And as EaglePrint matures we will be able to provide even more printing features and services for students in the future.
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