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Approved-By:  "Kara L. Robinson" <KROBINSO@KENTVM.BITNET>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.libref-l
Date:         Tue, 22 Dec 1992 08:47:29 EDT
From:         "Lee Jaffe,
              Microcomputer & Network Services" <jaffe@scilibx.ucsc.edu>
Subject: Re: Printers, paper and CD-ROMS

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
It seems that old topics never die.

I see two approaches to this question.  First, there is a range of
solutions to saving money on printing between a wide-open system and
the restrictive policy adopted.  The most obvious is to stop using
the ridiculously expensive HP paper.  Not only is it not necessary,
but with the advent of HP's 'plain-paper' ink cartridges it isn't
even recommended anymore.  You can even go down to the cheaper,
lighter-weight papers and save even more.  The HP cartridges are
another problem.  A number of libraries are using refill kits to
save money.  Our library has found a very inexpensive source for
ThinkJet cartridges that makes it not worthwhile refilling them.

If you can get away from the ThinkJets, your options open up con-
siderably.  You can get a very reliable dot-matrix printer with a
serial interface for about $200, a lot less than a ThinkJet.  Using
standard ribbons, these printers require a lot less maintenance and
cost less to run.  A ribbon costs about $4 while the cartridges go
for more than $8.  On top of that, I'd guess that ribbons average
more than 6 months' use each while the cartridges don't make it a
whole week.  I'm not going to do the math here, but you can see that
you can get your costs down very fast by replacing ThinkJets with
impact printers.  We like the Epson LX-810 a lot.  They have been
amazingly reliable, great paper-handlers and they cost half as much.
(You can get a serial interface for about $50 more, but we haven't
tried this out yet.)

If you want to be really creative, try replacing your terminals with
microcomputers.  Even old 8088 PCs, without hard drives, running a
cheap (public domain or shareware) communications program, will be
an improvement over most dumb terminals (unless you've been using
X terminals).  Not only will your printer control and speed improve,
but you can start promoting downloading to the floppy disk.  For
$50 you can even put a 3.5" drive in most old PCs and thus support
Mac users as well as DOS users.

These options are not very expensive.  We've ended up with a few
old XTs with dead hard drives in a our storeroom because it didn't
make sense to repair obsolete equipment.  ThinkJets have one of the
worst failure records of all the printers installed here and they
are consistently not worth repairing.  I think we pay about $275
for them.  At $170, the Epson LX-810 pays for its own paper without
even taking into account the savings from using ribbons instead of
cartridges. In part it takes the ability to move money between
budgets, but if you can you can realize enough savings to be back
in business.

Which brings me to the second approach to the printing problem.  This
topic has emerged more than once here and elsewhere and generates
some heat everytime.  I was recently re-reading some past messages and
was struck by a comment fro Glee Willis (I think) that seems apropos:
how can anyone justify spending 10s (if not 100s) of thousands of
dollars for access to these materials and then quibble about the
relatively minor cost of providing printing capability?  Or as some-
one else said: "You brought the guns but you forgot the bullets."
The recent posting is not a particularly good example since they
created a worst-case scenario and then threw up their hands in
resignation.

Supporting printing from terminals is not cheap and it is not easy.
However, few things we do in libraries are cheap or easy but some-
how we find a way to put printing in a different category and say
that we won't support it.  I find this to be a bad approach, one
that passes on our discomfort with technology to our users.  Is this
half-hearted attitude towards information technology really what we
want to project?  Do we want to base our service policy on this?

-- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz