Following the lead of peer institutions, the University announced yesterday it will stop distributing the Course Announcement Bulletin to students.
The catalogs — formerly distributed to returning students in the spring and to incoming students during the summer — will now only be made available to faculty members, academic advisers and Meiklejohn peer advisers, Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron wrote in an e-mail to the Brown community yesterday afternoon.
The move will cut down on environmental waste, as most students eschew the printed catalog in favor of online course information, she wrote.
"In the past, it was not uncommon to find recycling bins filled with CABs on the same afternoon they were distributed to mailboxes," Bergeron wrote. "By ending this wasteful practice, we hope to refocus resources and energies toward improving the ways we transmit course information to every constituency on campus."
The change will probably not result in significant financial savings for the University, Registrar Robert Fitzgerald said, because publication of the catalogs costs less than $10,000 a year. Instead, the new policy is "an effort to go green" and follow the lead of peer schools like Harvard and Penn, which have also ceased publishing printed course catalogs, he said.
The course catalog was inefficient because it "was outdated once it was published," Fitzgerald said.
To make up for the loss, Banner's Course Scheduler will display both fall and spring semester courses for the 2011-12 academic year leading up to pre-registration in April, Fitzgerald said. The Office of the Registrar will also keep a downloadable PDF on its website, he said.
The University did not distribute catalogs to first-year students last summer, and Fitzgerald said his office received no complaints. But Alex Rieckhoff '14 said a printed catalog could be helpful to new students and a better option than Banner.
"I found it really hard to go through online" to find classes to take, she said, adding that she eventually consulted a junior friend's catalog to make the process easier.
The catalog is more straightforward than Banner's Course Scheduler, said Robin Ulep '11, a Meiklejohn peer adviser. Ulep, who said she found the catalog especially useful when meeting with first-year advisees, said it is more easily navigable when comparing final exam times for classes.
First-year students are often the ones who should use the course catalog before moving on to other scheduling sources, as those students — unlike Meiklejohns — cannot be expected to know the "tips and tricks" of Banner, she said.
"It's just a good reference to have a paper copy," Ulep said.
Olivia Rodriguez '11, another Meiklejohn, said no one she knows uses the course catalog in place of Banner or Mocha. Rodriguez said she used the catalog during her first year of advising students but has since relied on Banner and Mocha — the student-created scheduling service unaffiliated with the University — because her advisees were more likely to use those tools.
Banner has also proven useful for looking up course descriptions while reading through the offerings of particular academic departments, Rodriguez said.
First-year students "want one site where they can do it all at once," she said.
Mike Amato '11 said the printed catalog was convenient but rarely as reliable as it needed to be because it could not be updated to include teacher and class time changes.
Online course schedulers "will be the future of picking classes," Amato said.
