Do E-Reserves lead to excessive paper waste?

I remember my freshman year core class and the first thing that comes to mind is the excessive reading that was assigned to us using E-Reserves, an option that allows professors to post the class texts online to be downloaded, usually in the PDF format. I also remember running out of my alotted "printing money" early on due to the amounts of pages that I had to print using this method.

When students complained about this issue, our professor would suggest that we read the articles online. However, for me and many other students, this was not an option. In order to truly absorb the reading, it's necessary for many students to be able to mark the pages either by underlining, highlighting, or using stick notes. For this reason, I was basically forced to print hundreds of sheets of reading which I felt was a tremendous waste even if recycled which I'm sure many students failed to do. I always wished there was something else that could have been done-- perhaps by making the files interactive so if read on a computer, they could still be marked? Or simply having professors keep several sets of these readings to reuse year after year? That would decrease paper waste greatly at Oxy. Sometimes, depending on the font size, it was possible to print two pages of reading per sheet. That was something, but not really an ideal solution. I suggest we look into this issue and try to implement a system in order to save readings for students so that once they have been read, they can be retained for future years' students...

Comments

[Rita Molestina]

I have the same feeling about e-reserves and printing in general. Maybe one idea would be to talk with the library staff and recommend that they have one or more printers dedicated to using recycled paper or the paper that normally gets thrown into the recycling bin below the printers. That way, students who normally wouldn't use recycled paper would have the easy option to doing so from their computer when choosing a printer to send their documents to. Students working as the reference librarian assistudents definitely have time to keep this routine up. I know...I used to work as one.

[Lilia Roldan Pharazyn]

I definitely agree with the above two postings. It pains me everytime I have to print out a twenty page e-reserve. In addition to the idea about printing out on recycled paper, I also think that printing things out double-sided would help with the paper consumption. Also, I think it would be cool if we could find some creative project that uses the recycled paper, either to make a display or make something to sell, so that we could get some recyling bins for bottles in library, b/c the only recyle bin for bottles that I know of is outside the library.

[Jeremy Gruber]

I couldn't agree more with the 2 previous posts. Oxy professors, namely the English department, love to have students print out 20-25 page reserves on a regular basis. And most of the time, the professor will only go over a few pages out of the bundle that we have to print out but that's another story. Occidental needs to look for an alternative source of reserves for classes. Having 30 students print out a 30 page reserve means 900 sheets of paper used. If there are more than one section of the class, this can mean anywhere between 1800 and 2700 sheets of paper for one class, on one day. I believe Parisa has hit the nail on the head on this issue and the school must look into paper conservation in the very near future.

[josh jones]

I definitely agree with the above posting and the subsequent comments. Here is a wild idea, i think that the library staff could get a list from each professor of course reserves they want. the library staff could then print them out and they could be loaned out to the students. by loaning them out this will ensure that the students will return them when they no longer need them, and they will be successfully recycled. with the current system in place students just print them out and when they are done with them they are just tossed with all other trash. this suggested system will ensure that these lengthy course reserves are properly recycled!!!!!

[sally Tracy]

Perhaps if they were to set up the printers in the library/ res hall computer labs to automatically print double sided it would alieviate this problem.

[Vikram Shankar]

It seems like a lot of us are in agreement on this issue and I bet it is the same throughout campus. For me the problem is also that I find a lot of the e-reserve reading unnecessary. I am speaking of one class in particular in which we had at least 30 pages of e-reserve reading a night. For such cases I wonder if there could be a cap on the amount of e-reserve readings assigned. It would force a professor to be more selective in terms of what he or she posts.

[Amanda Shaffer]

Some history from someone who was a student way back in '98....
Before the era of e-reserves, students purchased bound readers at the beginning of each course. If you were in Peter Dreier's class, these were the size of phone books. While in some ways this saved paper because people weren't tempted to print articles out multiple times, the readers were not reused from year to year, and were tossed at the end of the semester. When the libary started the e-reserve program they argued it would save paper because students could read articles online.