Students who utilize the library’s research area will have to start paying for printed materials, Snell Library officials announced recently. The InfoCommoms area printers will remain free of charge.
Maria Carpenter, the library’s advancement program manager, said library officials received complaints from students about users printing out large documents. This contributed to the library recycling 42,900 pounds of paper from Internet printing every month.
“There is a big cost and environmental issue here,” Carpenter said, referring to the more than two tons of paper. “We want to encourage people to think before they print.”
Users will have to pay to print at the computer stations located on the first floor of the library. They will be able to obtain cards from machines located in the lobby, and be able to purchase as many print jobs as needed.
Each print job will cost “between 6 and 10 cents,” Carpenter said. For $1, users will be able to purchase 10 copies at 10 cents each. However, if a user purchases a card with more print jobs on it, the cost will amount to six cents per copy. A user can add any amount of money, even change, onto a card up to $20. A $20 card would yield 333 copies at six cents each.
The cards will also be applied to the library’s copy machines, which used to run at 10 cents per copy.
According to Dean and Director of Libraries Edward Warro, Northeastern is one of the last major universities in the area to begin charging for printing. He said the new cost would ultimately be beneficial to students, despite the initial charge.
“What we’ve had until this time is students, through tuition, paying for outside users to print,” he said. “Students from other universities would say ‘Hey, we’ve got a lot of printing to do – let’s go to Northeastern.”
The new policy has left some students saying the library has not yet exhausted all of its options.
“It sucks that because of people who don’t go to Northeastern, people who do go to Northeastern end up getting charged,” said Julia Miller, a middler psychology major. “As opposed to [students] paying for a card, why don’t they give Northeastern students the card?”
Since Snell is a government depository library, meaning an official recipient of government documents, it cannot completely close to outside users. Instead, they will keep free printing in the InfoCommons area – where a Northeastern ID is needed to gain access – and have users pay throughout the rest.
Warro said library staff estimated the new money will completely cover printing costs – which currently total $70,000 per year – and put the rest toward upkeep of collections and expanding the library’s technological capabilities.
The library, Warro said, is constantly struggling financially, hard-pressed to keep up with current periodical subscriptions and acquire the vast amount of new books coming out every year.
The Class of 2004 bestowed a donation gift, one of the most impressive in recent years, of $21,000 to the library. As it turns out, that would not have covered a third of the printing costs if the new printing charge had not been put in place.
“We still have a long way to go to make up these costs, but this puts us in the right direction,” Warro said.
– News staff writer Sarah Metcalf contributed to this report.
