Over the summer of 2011, Library IT faced a tough decision on public printing.  The long-time print service, LibPrint, was showing its age.  The original developers had long since left the Library, and there were no programmers available to service and maintain the code base.  Hiring new people was a near impossibility at the time, and contract work to bring the system up to date could have cost upwards of $100,000.  The only option that remained was to look for a commercial product, so an evaluation period was launched to find the new printing system.  After a thorough evaluation of products, we launched PaperCut in a pilot program at the Undergraduate Library over spring break, 2012.

Over a year later, PaperCut has proven to be a capable and powerful replacement.  Thus, with little fanfare, LibPrint was officially retired this week.

Although the final days of LibPrint were marred by performance issues and a lack of features (such as two-sided printing), it was very innovative for its time.  LibPrint introduced the web-based release station, which allowed for laptop printing.  It offered an innovative way of recovering cost for printed documents.  It included a self-service package installer for Windows and Mac, and provided a very effective and responsive way to detect printer errors.  LibPrint also used a proprietary algorithm for determining the true cost of color printing, by calculating the amount of toner used on a color print job.

LibPrint processed its first job on June 25, 2002.  Over its nearly 11 year lifespan, it handled 3,604,863 print jobs from 143,193 distinct users, totaling 18,304,992 pages (456,654 color).