Technical Division lessens paper waste

Engineering drawings like this one, which members of the Cryogenics Department used in 1995, are now stored electronically.

Starting today, Technical Division employees will save trees, time and money by doing more work electronically.

Rather than printing each drawing associated with a project for each interested party, TD employees will circulate them as PDF files. The Technical Division already stores drawings electronically, but paper copy distribution has still been the norm - until now.

About 15 employees in Technical Division's design and drafting group processed an estimated 2,000 drawings in 2009, said Don Mitchell, manager of the Design & Drafting Department.

Mitchell, who worked as a Fermilab engineer for about 19 years before stepping into his new job, said his file cabinet drawers used to be stuffed with printed drawings. "The more years you've been here, the more things pile up."

Designing large devices can involve hundreds of drawings, said David Harding, associate head of the Technical Division. "If you make a revision to one drawing, you have to understand the impact on the others."

Making sure every drawing is properly reviewed and approved in the context of related drawings is an important part of Technical Division's quality assurance program, Harding said. "Electronic tracking should improve the process."

The move away from printing will mean a lot less time spent copying, folding, stapling and distributing for administrative assistant Helen Szuba-Jensen, who processes at least one set of drawings almost every day.

"Probably 80 percent of that copying will be cut," she said.

Mitchell and others first put the idea of going paperless to the test about a year and a half ago while working remotely with physicists at DESY in Germany. They used an electronic database in Hamburg to maintain files.

"It works," Mitchell said. "Now we want to broaden it to the rest of the division."

-- Kathryn Grim

Administrative assistants Helen Szuba-Jensen and Renee Mussatto stand with supervisor Karen Swanson in front of a full-size version of an engineering drawing, holding some of the last reduced-size copies to be printed for distribution. Photo courtesy of Fermilab engineer Tom Nicol.

Time to smash things up

From Achenblog, a Washington Post blog, March 19, 2010

They're about to start smashing things up at the Large Hadron Collider, the huge particle accelerator outside Geneva. Just to play it safe, I'm going to remain over here in North America, keeping a large chunk of the planet between me and this experiment.

No, I'm not worried that they're going to blow up up Europe. That's impossible! I'm just worried they'll create a time warp and I'll go back 6 months and be forced to relive the health care debate.

[Or worse: Back 35 years and I'm once again The Human Oddity of Hogtown.]

Seriously, although there are some hand-wringers out there who prophesy the end of the world, there's nothing to worry about. I've been to the LHC. I've been down in the tunnel. I've studied the beam line, the huge magnets, the detectors the size of small apartment buildings. What I can tell you with confidence is that it merely LOOKS like a doomsday machine.

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