While the prospect of a physical library embracing a complete conversion to serving patrons with purely digitalized materials may be decades off, the move towards drastically reducing the use of paper behind the scenes might just be imminent. The feasibility of a truely paperless office may be very low, but with affectors like the current economy, a trend towards increasing technology budgets, and the Greenies screaming at us to stop running entire forests through our printers, a move towards a “Paper-Light” office may be inevitable.
~ I just thought I was so clever coining the term “Paper-Light” until I Googled it and found about 800 zillion sites that already talk about it … I guess like-minded people think alike ~
I make no secret that I’m a fan of print. I can’t read books on my iPhone, I can barely read a four page PDF finding the nearest spoon and scooping my eyeballs out. I have about two good Red Oaks worth of sci-fi books on my shelves, and twice my weight in educational materials I’ve been unable to part with over the years. But for some reason I’ve always been of the “grass is greener” mindset when it comes to going paperless in the office. I’ve somehow become convinced that life will be full of happiness, and little faeries will float around singing magical songs about the Utopian ideal as I uninstall my printer drivers and start saving to PDF.
Never one to shy away from a self imposed challenge I’ve decided to give it a go. Starting today and lasting for at least two weeks, I am going to make my office related paper document generation goal a low, but hopefully attainable, one page per day. If it’s already digital and I need to read it, I’ll grit my teeth, maximize my PDF reader, and wish my eyes would cease existing. The laptop will come to meetings for information display and\or collection. If I need to pass any of that info on, it will be as an attachment or link to a saved file. To make it easier I’ll uninstall that printer driver so that I’ll have to reinstall it if I feel that I really A-100% have to print something.
Why would I do this to myself? I see a trend, based almost completely on a financial motivator, towards reducing paper in the public-sector office by just about any means feasable. In fact I’m going to be tracking just what “feasable” means in this sense over the next many weeks, months, and even years. I want to be an expert if\when the paper-light mandate comes down the pipes. Even if it doesn’t, I want to be ready to help others find ways to save money directly and through reducing inefficiencies. And mostly I just want to see how “painful” it really is. You’ll never know what a good yard sale feels like if you don’t bomb a double-black with some ice-pack moguls right?
