Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

WHILE YOU WERE away this summer, Harvard libraries quietly raised their photocopying price from a nickel to a dime. Five cents, they claim, simply was not enough to compensate for the wear and tear that xeroxing causes the University's collection. And since prices haven't been raised since the '60s, it was time for a change.

They also announced that a new, experimental copy card system would be installed to smooth the transition to the ten-cent copy-but, drumroll, only in the Anthropology Department's Tozzer Library. As for the other, more popular xeroxing sites on campus--Hilles, Lamont, and Widener--save your dimes.

It's vintage Harvard, where frugality and caution are routinely carried to excess. The University's refusal to install the more efficient and time-saving copy card system in its major libraries is, after all, typical of an institution which has a $3 billion endowment and charges over $10,000 in tuition, yet nonetheless claims that it cannot afford to keep Widener open on Sunday and has spent years deciding whether carpetting Lamont Library would break its piggy bank.

Even when clearly warranted, improvements require endless deliberation and delay. Putting copy card readers only in the little-used Tozzer Library is a case in point.

And a copy card system--in which people insert a card with photocopy credit on it into the copier in place of coins--is clearly warranted, especially in light of the price hike. In exchange for the 100 percent increase in cost, users deserve something in return. Why not eliminate the need to drop a dime into the machine before making each copy?

No longer would xerox machines run out of change and stand idle until a technician arrives to add nickels. And since we wouldn't have to keep dumping coins into the machines between copies, we could all xerox about twice as fast. That's a real savings.

The University, following its Great Frugal Tradition, no doubt is worried that it cannot afford to install copy card readers. But this time, poverty is a poor excuse. Prices are doubling, and the extra revenue that this will bring should easily make up for the expense which copy cards entail.

In fact, copy cards could save the libraries money. It is now cheaper to photocopy at Kinko's than at Lamont. And when library books are copied elsewhere, Harvard loses. The books still accumulate additional wear, but Kinkos gets the money.

WHY ARE PRICES going from a nickel to a dime anyway? The libraries do not necessarily need ten cents for each photocopy. They merely need more than a nickel. But as long as we have to insert coins, the seven-cent photocopy is an idea whose time will never come.

Copy cards would change all that. Instead of eating coins, the machines could deduct credit from your copy card. And deducting 7 or 8 cents from a copy card is just as easy as deducting 10 cents. Even if installing a copy card system would raise the cost of each copy by a penny, at 8 or 9 cents everyone is still better off.

Of course, Harvard wants to test out copy cards in a small library--one where, incidently, most students will never go--before committing to a card system on a large scale. But if the cautious minds who run the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' libraries bothered to stroll over to Langdell, they would discover that the copy card system already at the law library works just fine.