How Central Printing Works

Surprisingly, a lot goes on behind the scenes of central printing students are unaware of. When the jobs are sent off from one of the institutions computers or from a personal computer on the school’s network,  it is received on one of the UNIX systems over at the Central Printing Services office to where it enters a queue to be printed. Once these jobs are printed, a copy of the jobs details is made by another server which hosts the information on the web where a student can log in using their credentials to see details of jobs they have sent to Central PS. Also, once the jobs are printed and removed from the tray, they are sorted, placed in boxes and delivered to the Resource Centre on the first floor of the library at the specified delivery times.

These machines are built strong enough to handle the capacity of jobs sent daily. One thing to also note is they are run on a separate network from the school for security purposes.

Student Survey

In order to get a better idea of how students feel about and use Central Printing, we conducted a small survey of sixteen currently enrolled students. Ten of the students were interviewed while they were picking up their print outs from the Central Printing pickup area in the basement of the library. The remaining six students were students who were in the College of Computing Commons. While in no way statistically significant, there are some interesting qualitative observations that can be made. We asked all students the following questions:

– How often do you print to Central Printing?

People tend to fall into one of two categories; either, a person uses Central Printing once or twice every two weeks, or a person almost never used Central Printing. Of the later group, a typical answer was, “In the five years I’ve been at Georgia Tech, I’ve used it once, and that was to print out a textbook …” . All of the surveyed students knew what Central Printing is.

– What do you usually print?

The group of people who regularly used Central Printing, tended to print out PowerPoint slides and articles while all the infrequent users of the system exclusively used it to print textbooks.

– Are you aware that Central Printing provides services such as binding? If so, have you ever utilized those services?

Frequent users of the Central Printing tended to know about additional services, but only one of the sixteen students had ever used it for a service beyond regular printing. Infrequent users uniformly were not aware of the additional services provided by CPS.

– Are the print to collect times appropriate?

There was uniform agreement amongst all students surveyed that the print to pickup time is convenient.

– What do you think of the library as a pickup location?

There was uniform agreement amongst all students surveyed that the pickup location is convenient.

– Do you recycle your notes after you no longer need them?

Seven people said they recycled their notes after use; three people had kept the documents they printed; four people said they threw away their papers; and two people had never printed anything in the first place.

– Is mobile printing the main way in which you print to Central Printing?

Four people used mobile printing as their main method of printing to Central Printing. The rest of the people surveyed used on campus computers.

We were not expecting that there would be such distinct groups of usage profiles. It seems that the Computer Science majors who were interviewed in the College of Computing Commons all fell into a low printing group. Other majors seemed to utilize Central Printing much more readily. It would be interesting to extend our exploration of usage patterns so that we could have a systematic comparison of Central Printing utilization on the basis of different Majors normalized for different enrollment sizes.

Notes from a talk with Scott Perkins

Scott Perkins is the Business Operations Manager at CPS at Georgia Tech, and he was nice enough to take the time to show us the CPS facilities and answer some questions we had about their work.  The notes from our meeting with Scott Perkins follow along with a few thoughts on some points that jumped out.

NOTES

Jobs are color coded; green – mondays, blue – tuesdays and wednesdays, yellow – thursdays and fridays. Helps to know which stacks to pick up without looking at the dates. If jobs aren’t picked up by students, they are recycled.

Central ps is big on recycling. They use 30% recycled paper to print, and recently moved from using paper from companies that wrap about 500 sheets and then place them in boxes to a company that places the papers directly in boxes so only the boxes have to be recycled.

So far, there is no way to catch copyrighted jobs until they are printed and at which point they aren’t delivered to the student unless the student can show proof they have a license to print the book. For example, the receipt from buying a digital book online is proof. Books that Georgia Tech has licenses to can also be printed.

Since one sheet has two sides, documents are usually printed onto both sides, but sometimes this may not be the case, so central ps uses impressions to calculate what is printed. One year is regarded as July 1st – June 30th.

Trends in printing have increased since the Pharaoh system which allows students to print  wirelessly from their personal computers. July 1st 2008 to June 30th 2009 – 4.8 million impressions were printed. It is assumed from July 1st 2009 to June 30th 2010 – 7.3 million impressions would be printed. About a 56% increase.

Central Printing can be advantageous to students, when used to print powerpoints, notes, finished assignments etc but there is noticed there’s an increase in students printing blank sheets of paper, ruled notebook sheets, calendars, duplicate manuals. Because CPS does not aim to be a supplier of blank paper or a printer for student manuscript distribution,  OIT and CPS are working on ways in which they can stop such abuse of the system by students. If a student is noticed to continually print such documents, a note of warning is sent to them. If it continues, an email is then sent.

Copyright Infringement Warning:

Invalid Print Job:

The growth of the number of impressions over the last few years is astounding. It will be interesting to see whether the number of impressions continues to grow so quickly or will plateau once the student body is saturated in their awareness of the wireless access option to the Pharaoh system. One particularly interesting aspect of the system is the handling of copyright infringement; it seems that going through each document printed and verifying that it doesn’t infringe copyright would be a monumental task. It seems that one just can’t escape the content control implications of readily available content (non-breaking and breaking copyright) on the internet.

Student Audio Interviews

We interviewed 3 students in the Georgia Tech student center to get a better feel for how students generally feel about Central Printing, copyright jobs being printed to central printing, and possible environmental impacts of Central Printing.

Aniekan discusses his views on the environmental impact of central printing.

Aniekan discusses his views on others printing of copyrighted documents through Central Printing.

Frank discusses what he thinks of Central Printing and its impact on the environment.

Frank discusses his his views on others printing of copyrighted documents through Central Printing.

Okeoma discusses her opinion on the environmental impact of Central Printing.

Exploring Central Printing

Central Printing and Copying Services (http://www.pcs.gatech.edu/) is known popularly to Georgia Institute of Technology students as the hub where most of their bulk printing for the semester is done. Located on 811 Marietta Street, Central PCS is a division under Georgia Tech’s Office of Information Technology (OIT). In addition to handling student printing jobs, Central PCS also handles most of the printing jobs for departments on the Georgia Tech campus including but not limited to brochures, posters, calendars and other print items.



Our group wants to explore the role of Central Printing plays within Georgia Tech. A growing portion of information being consumed by the students at Georgia Tech comes in the form of online documents and websites; we are interested in how students use Central Printing and what their use patterns says about the way students relate to the resources Georgia Tech provides.