How Princh helped to improve the printing service at Horten Library

Horten Library

About Horten Library

Horten City is located in the “sunny part” of Eastern Norway and it is one of the homes of the famous Norwegian painter Edvard Munch – the master behind the painting, “The Scream”.

Horten City has around 27 200 citizens all of which benefit from the services offered by Horten Library.

Horten Library is a branch library part of the Vestfold County Libraries in Norway. Horten Library made Princh available to their visitors in May 2017. To get more insights about how Princh has helped improve the printing service at Horten Library, we’ve met with Knut Helium, Senior Librarian at Horten Library.

“Princh was the only printing solution that could help us offer a better service to our users and do it at a fair cost.”

Challenges

A challenge we faced regarding printing was that there were users who would accidentally print more pages than they needed to. In some cases, this meant a large number of pages were printed when only a fraction of the pages was needed. This led to many discussions about how much that user should pay and, in many cases, we had to accept payment for only the one or two pages they actually wanted.

It was difficult for our library staff to help guide users through the printing process. In addition, our previous printing solution did not offer users the capability to print from their laptops or smartphones. Before implementing Princh, our users had to log on to the library’s PCs, print from there, collect their printed documents, count the pages and then pay for their print job with the library staff.

It is where people have access to libraries outside of working hours. Therefore, it was important for us to offer our library users the ability to print and pay by themselves, while still being able to monitor the amount of print jobs. Another issue we encountered was we that did not know how many print jobs were made daily or how many people were printing daily. Simultaneously, we were also adapting to the new concept for libraries in Norway.

Implementation

When we were assessing the different options for printing solutions, Princh was the only printing solution that could help us solve our issues, offer a better service to our users and do it at a fair cost.

The implementation process was smooth and easy. The IT responsible at Horten municipality was the one taking care of the installation at our library. He was already familiar with the printing solution because he learned about Princh from Tønsberg Library in Norway, who is also using it.

Horten Collection

Results

Princh’s printing solution works well and with every new update, we notice more and more features added. The aspects we find most important about Princh is the ability to print and pay from all devices. From a user point-of-view, many like the privacy aspect. Their documents are kept private. Only the person printing has access to the document and they don’t need to show it to the staff.

Now, users can print without assistance from a library staff member, making the process more efficient for both the users and the staff. We’ve also noticed that the users enjoy the different payment methods that are available to them.

Some users still prefer to pay at the desk and they still have that option with Princh’s staff release function. With this function, the staff can approve print jobs before they are sent to the printers, it is a great feature and it has made our work easier.

“Now, users can print without assistance from a library staff member.”

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