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Rev. Michael J. Garanzini had big plans for Loyola University Chicago when he was appointed its president in 2001. Among the building projects and the debt reduction plans, Garanzini set down a new security mandate. According to Frank Dale, Loyola's manager of physical security, the new president "wanted to know who was coming and going into and out of these buildings." And with that requirement began a multi-phase project that ultimately brought the university a wide-ranging security upgrade with campus-wide support and cutting-edge technology.
Too Many Systems
Ranked a top national university by U.S. News & World Report, Loyola University Chicago is one of the largest Jesuit universities in the United States. Its two educational campuses, Lake Shore and Water Tower, are open campuses about five miles apart. The university considers Water Tower its urban center, located off Chicago's "Magnificent Mile," while Lake Shore serves as the main residential campus.
In 2001, Loyola's security situation was like patchwork. Students, faculty and staff carted around a variety of access and ID cards with different, isolated functions and varying technologies. There were name tags for parking, both prox and bar code technologies for access to buildings, a bar code library card, a magstripe for vending and cafeteria, and the list goes on. What's more, the administrative departments for each of these credentials—which varied based on functionality—maintained their own databases and mainframe systems for the different cards. The university's video system comprised analog cameras and a mixture of VCRs and DVRs, none of which proved particularly useful for identification or investigation.
If Loyola was to meet its new president's seemingly simple demand to see who was coming and going, the university's many administrative departments would have to work together to accomplish two feats: a change to a one-card access control and ID environment, and a move to a video system that allowed upward mobility and easy identification of subjects.
Leading a Team Effort
The first phase of the project would focus on the development of a one-card access control and ID system. To ensure that the final solution would meet the needs of all the departments already using disparate IDs, Edward Zeimetz, Division of Facilities project manager, began calling weekly team meetings with the help of Jim Gompers, president of Gompers Inc. and security technology consultant on the project.
Because so many departments held an interest in the new system, the meetings were immense and long, sometimes topping four hours. They included representatives from Facilities, IT, IS, Residence Life, Libraries, Finance, Parking and Campus Cards, the university's architect and contractual consultant, and, of course, security. With so many stakeholders, each with different goals, these meetings required patience and some creative leadership.
"We found out early on that, for example, some people may not participate or interject or add any value to a group of meetings for a 30-day period, but then when we made a decision, they were the first ones to start screaming and yelling. And that sent us back to square one," said Gompers. "So we learned through the process that you have to force participation, ask key questions and create tools to do this.
"For example, you create a hot list, where everybody's tasked with a simple task or to make a specific decision, and you put out this hot list to the entire group so that everybody sees that Jim Gompers has things he has to produce, and Facilities has things they have to produce, and Security has to make some decisions … Sending this list to everybody forces their participation or they look bad to the group. And that was the key thing to overcoming problems within a project of this size."
The Single-Card Switch
After much consideration and compromise, the team agreed upon a multi-technology card that includes proximity, bar code and magstripe. The university standardized on prox for access control, requiring replacement of bar code access readers on some buildings, but for the most part the multi-technology card format allowed them to avoid an indiscriminate and costly rip-and-replace scenario.
More challenging was the prospect of integrating all the disparate databases for both students and staff into a single platform. To that end, the team created a centralized Oracle database, originally called LUware, to act as a sort of gatekeeper of the systems data, according to Gompers. This middleware database populates the different databases used to administer the card.
The new integrated database environment opens up a degree of flexibility and functionality unimaginable under the previous systems. For example, it makes it possible for the security team to use video verification when a student uses a badge for access to a campus building or residence. Said Gompers, "They're using MAXxess for their access control platform, but their student ID pictures don't reside in MAXxess. So to do video verification of a person entering a lab or building, we actually wrote a query back to Blackboard, which is the keeper of the ID photos, and we wrote a query through that LU middleware for extracting those files from a different system. That's allowing them to do video verification. If somebody swipes their card at a turnstile or a door where there is a security presence, it will pop up their picture so security can look and say yes, this is Jane Smith."
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the first phase of the project wasn't the technology but the time line. "We started meeting in January but we had to actually put everything into work by May, because we had to have the ID cards stock in and printed up and ready by August," in time for the Fall semester, said Dale. "It wasn't a lot of time, and you're talking around 14,000 IDs that had to be up and ready by the Fall. So it was busy."
Gompers said when he first walked onto the project he told the main project manager there was no way the job could be completed in time for a Fall rollout. "But we started expediting things, pulling together the right teams, and we pulled it off," he said. "But we did have God's intervention, I swear."
ID-Quality Video
The second phase of the project—upgrading the video surveillance system—was somewhat easier by comparison. The majority of Loyola's video recording systems were VCRs, which made investigations difficult because of difficulty searching and low image quality. To meet President Garanzini's mandate to see every person going in and out of the buildings on the campuses, Loyola needed better image quality and a video platform that would provide access to video from all cameras at a central command location and from multiple remote locations.
Standardization was the name of this game. "They're (standardizing cameras) because by the time they get 500 of the same cameras out there, if something breaks, they know it, and they usually have a couple on the shelf to replace it with. It just makes sense," said Gompers. The university decided to go with megapixel cameras in the interior and exterior environments to achieve ID-grade image quality for investigative purposes.
To choose models, they held a shoot-out between multiple manufacturers of network megapixel cameras. At the end of the day, only two manufacturers' products were left standing. "We looked at image quality and there were a couple that stood side by side, but for the price, the clarity and the flexibility in features, we standardized on 1.3 megapixel IQinVision cameras for both interior and exterior," said Gompers. The university can lower the cameras' resolution if necessary for indoor environments, but they'll still have the option to turn it back up later if the camera needs to move or the application changes. They also implemented Toshiba megapixel PTZ cameras.
The outdoor megapixel cameras allow the security staff to keep an eye on students at the periphery of campus, on the nearby El platform, or crossing the street. This is particularly important at Water Tower, where the urban environment makes outdoor campus safety a bigger challenge.
The team also implemented Milestone NVR software to manage and access video. The budget would not at first
author: By Marleah Blades