Nobody likes Mondays. Identified by the International Standards organization as the first day of the work week, named for the influence of the Moon on our body's chemistry and mood, Monday is the least enjoyable day of the week, right up to the fact that you're statistically more likely to drop dead or try to kill yourself on a Monday than any of the other six days of the week. So Mondays already get a bad rap.
Some days, though, I wonder if the bad news vibe of the day isn't genuinely warranted. I'll explain more fully: today, all of the printing equipment broke down. All of it. The three printers refused to print, the two copiers were in slightly differing states of disrepair, and Monday is our most busy, most crowded day in the library. Students complain when they don't have the tools they need to finish their assignments, and rightly so. Some of our students are in the habit of complaining about relatively minor details. Not today. Today they all had every right to scream.
I'm not going to dwell on this but I do have one bit of advice for anyone who happens to be in a position to affect the development of their own libraries. Here it is: buy the best equipment you can afford.
See? Simple. At least, it sounds simple. It should be simple. Buy the best equipment you can afford. Quality is expensive. I get that. But failure is more expensive in the long term.
Yes, budgets are tight. But come on, how difficult, how eminently reasonable is it to pick up the phone and call a vendor with a suitable reputation for excellence (I'm thinking of Hewlett-Packard here but substitute your preference) and say something to a sales rep on the order of, "Look, here's the deal. I'm buying a new printer for my library. We go through two and a half million sheets of printed paper a year . . . yes . . . I know it's ridiculous, but bear with me . . . and we have about a thousand students, almost all of whom will spend at least some time in the library. They're going to bang on the printers, open and close paper drawers, mess with the settings, all of that. No, it's not the way I'd like it to go, but we're under-staffed and these are aggressive kids. Anyway, here's my budget, what's the toughest machine you can recommend, including service options?"
It goes from there. It's that simple. Get a robust printer or copier* and see what kind of service options are available, because like all machines, it will break down at some point. You don't want to be stuck wondering who to call for help when it does.
Believe me, folks, this advice is worth every penny you're paying for it.
*I know that there are copiers which print and printers which copy. Do not combine these functions in a single unit. Better to have some students pissed off because the printer is temporarily down than to have all your students annoyed because your printer died and took the only copier with it as a result. Resource management is about limiting the possible points of failure.
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