Those blue and yellow scheduling books you’re used to seeing in offices and around campus will soon be a thing of the past.

Kent State is expecting to save about $30,000 a year by eliminating the paper books and making the information available exclusively online, University Registrar Roberta Sikula-Schwalm said.

The catalogs have been available online since 1996. At that time, the university started cutting back on the amount of paper books being printed.

“I use the Internet,” senior anthropology major Ben Zandarski said, but he doesn’t think the university should do away with the paper books altogether. “It’s a good reference to have when you’re not by a computer and you just want to look at your options.”

He’s not alone.

“It’s like the idea of eliminating the library,” assistant English professor Florence Dore said. “It’s a bad idea. I think the physical object of the book is an important medium.”

But the university will save money, and departments will have more time to prepare for classes.

The books take about a month to produce, and they are out-of-date the minute they are published, Sikula-Schwalm said.

“If (the book) could be up-to-date, it would be a good thing to have,” history department secretary Nancy Myers said, but she understands the need to have the information on the Internet.

Although the information has been available online for nine years, the Office of the University Registrar is enhancing the site, and it will now be updated nightly. It will also be available 24 hours a day. The online catalog is full of selection features and is in a PDF format, so students can find what they need easily and print out a copy.

“We find most of the time students are carrying around printed-out versions,” Sikula-Schwalm said.

The books will still be printed through Fall 2005.

Students can visit www.registrars.kent.edu/home/ and click on “schedule of classes” to view the online catalog.

Contact student financial reporter Katie Greenwald at [email protected].