According to Bruce Little of BCTC and the Reference Wiki, vendor printing is only available from the stand-up computers. I’m not certain when this change actually happened, but it was some time during the past six months or so. I know I am personally confused by this since I have assisted guests & currently, non-registered Baruch students with vendor printing at the sit-down computers located behind the Reference Desk within the past six months. Bruce Little is looking into this as per our conversation, today (Jan. 10 , 2012). He states it may be a network problem/glitch. However, the “official” printing policy is that vendor printing can only be done via the stand-up computers.
Question: Are there enough stand-up computers to allow for this limitation? (If this topic has already been covered, my apologies.)
I am wondering why we limit the number of PCs that can connect to the vendor printer in the first place. Is is technological problem that keeps us from making vendor printer access available from all library computers? Is it connected to the issue of maintaining as few possible images for the different kinds of computers in the library?
I spoke to Jean A about this, and it is a technological problem. I’m not going to do his explanation justice, but the gist of it is – if the vendor printer is available from all the machines on that floor, each machine on the network constantly pings it. This overwhelms the vp and forces it offline, as it’s too old to handle the traffic. This problem is overcome by limiting the number of machines that have access to it.