Digital Formats
School of Law: Reduced use of paper
Problem: Reduce the costs of a large, school expense - the use of paper.
Change: Placing more written material on-line, review more material on-line, reduce use of publication offices to design marketing materials, employ email rather than a mailing service, and redirect users to on-line applications.
Handbooks and Journals:
- The Adjunct Faculty handbook was placed on-line in 2009.
- The William & Mary Law Review reduced the use of printed material for cite-checking. All William & Mary Law School student-edited journals emailed edited articles to authors.
Course and Committee Materials:
- Our Summer Abroad Program in Madrid copied thousands of pages of course material in the past. In summer 2008 we implemented a max printing page limit per course and placed other materials on the University provided Blackboard.
- Our four-semester Legal Skills Program is required of all law students. During an academic year, the Program would administer a seven-page course evaluation to more than 850 students. Last year, the Program created an on-line survey, using University-provided software.
- The Faculty Appointments Committee vets hundreds of teaching applications. We encouraged the Committee to make review of applications on-line. We also encouraged the faculty, as a body, to review the interview materials on-line through University-provided software.
Marketing:
- The Institute of Bill of Rights Law eliminated publishing and mailing marketing material for the annual Supreme Court Preview.
- The Law School Admission Office reused the layout of and reduced the prospective applicant viewbook size and quantity ordered.
Library materials:
- In the past 10 years, the Wolf Law Library has selectively cancelled primary law and loose-leaf materials subscriptions. Total money saved since 2001 is more than $1,600,000, including approximately $252,000 in 2010 (these figures are not adjusted for price inflation, so actual savings are significantly greater). As a substitute for this paper, we direct folks to Westlaw and Lexis (no additional cost to the Law School over our existing subscription rates) and have subscribed to the widely-used BNA and CCH law resource databases.
- Use of these on-line databases not only reduces employee time to manage the documents, but also improves faculty access to the material which once was routed through a distribution list before being filed in the library. Though the BNA and CCH database subscriptions are significant, by cancelling all these print materials, we were able to eliminate one FTE position and re-allocate staff duties to improve the work efficiency within the Library.
Impact: The total savings in a one year period (and savings that are an annual cost reduction) is approximately $270,000.
Alumni Association: Reducing the cost of the Alumni Magazine
Problem: Magazine costs had been increasing based on higher paper costs, increasing postal costs and decreasing advertising revenue.
Changes/Actions: We examined ways to incrementally reduce costs without sacrificing quality, and especially wanted to reduce costs as we needed to get back to publishing four issues per year as a key strategic alumni communications piece. Specific efforts to bring about changes were: Changed paper quality from #3 stock to lower, cheaper #4 stock while maintaining production quality; moved printer location in 2008 from Burlington, Vt., to Dulles, Va., for cheaper shipping costs; increased advertising revenue to enable utilizing space normally used for paid ads to leverage Alumni Association events, products and services to the readership.
Impacts: Maintained quality of publication despite changes in staff and in printing costs: the William and Mary Alumni Magazine won both a 2008 and a 2010 Award of Excellence from CASE District III. Publishing costs have dropped from a high of $300,000 to $263,000 for FY 09/10.
