Friday, April 17, 2009

Troubleshooting technology

At Arcadia University, reference librarians work with instructional technologists in a unit within the Library Department called Instructional Technology and Library Research Services. The details of why this is and why it's a good idea are for another post. The significance is that besides being the Sciences Librarian, I'm also the student supervisor for instructional technology.

With final presentations fast arriving (it's Week 13 of 14), we're actively managing poster printing. These posters are the big ones you see at professional meetings that students have prepared based on their research.

The lab where the padawans work (read padawan as student apprentices--only the Sith have apprentices) is in the library physically. The large format printer is in Information Technology in a neighboring building. This makes life interesting because we have to monitor the progress of printing remotely. Although you can see from the printer window if a print job has failed, you don't necessarily know exactly why. So far the only causes I've known of are empty ink cartridges or a spent paper roll. I haven't known of more causes because this year is the first that I've done this supervision and, thus, been involved with the printing process.

One phenomenon that I did notice as we monitored printing remotely is that there are other users printing other projects that aren't posters. You can see them interspersed with the presentation poster print jobs we send.

Here's the lesson. It is important to get to know the relevant processes before giving full control to a padawan--or anyone else for that matter. After all, knowledge is power.

I'm sitting next to the printer now because there are no padawans on duty. Normally I'd be in the library but the printer report indicated that there was a failure. I could have called an IT student apprentice (they must be Sith over in IT) to check on the printer status, but I figured I'd just look myself.

What I found was a lab full of design students. My poster print job was failing because the design students were trading out paper rolls from poster paper to drawing vellum. I watched a student change the paper back but still had the poster print job I was handling fail twice more. I looked at the printer and noticed it querying for the user to load the paper even though she already had and had then left for the day. I removed the poster paper and reloaded it. Then I realized that she had never changed the printer's paper setting. She had changed the paper to poster paper, but the setting was still for vellum.

If I had been sitting in the library, I would never have realized that the other print jobs I was seeing in the queue could be contributing to failed print jobs. So now I know of 3 possible reasons why a print job can fail that I can notify the padawans to be aware of.

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