Printer Service

Printing in the Lab has always been an expensive and controversial portion of our operations -- necessitating close monitoring to control costs associated with printer consumables.

The Printer Service offered in the Design Lab is independent of that provided in other University public labs which is now supported on a pay-for-print basis.   Our Service is available without charge to those with Personal User Accounts.  

The Service is funded from a very limited Department overhead budget -- which has grown ever smaller over the past several years.

Print-monitoring software has recently been installed to provide detailed information as to what is being printed, how much, and by whom.   Users with access to Lab printers are asked to comply with the Printer Policy provided below.   Failure to comply is easily detected by the monitoring software.

Printer Policy

Our printers are intended for students to make hard-copies of work they do themselves -- particularly that work done in the Design Lab.  Such work includes resumes, theses, homework assignments, design reports, drawings and technical presentations.

The casual printing of class notes found at the UVa Toolkit Web site is vigorously discouraged.   The same is true of other files downloaded from the Web.

The ITC public labs are the proper location for printing this material.   There are 3 such labs (in Thornton Hall, Small Hall & the Chemistry Building) within a 2 minute walk of the Design Lab.

The Design Lab is NOT the place for convenient walk-in printing.

Users are expected to minimize the load they place on our print resources.

Abuse of our limited Printer Service will jeopardize a user's access to the Lab printers.

Printer Operations

The continued maintenance of an orderly, cost-efficient, and useful Printer Service can only be achieved with the active help of all authorized users of the Lab's facilities.   To assist you in better utilizing our printer resources, the following descriptive information should prove useful.   Please take just the few minutes required to familiarize yourself with this information.