Card access is key to University of Virginia's lock problems

Dec 1, 2000 12:00 PM, RANDY SOUTHERLAND

With its central lawn and trademark rotunda, the University of Virginia at Charlottesville exemplifies the classic academic setting. More than 18,000 students pursue their studies where Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of American democracy, once walked.

Ensuring security for the young people living in this thriving academic community falls to the university's housing lock shop. Maintaining nearly 20 dormitory buildings housing 3,200 students, lock shop foreman David Handy and his crew are in charge of more than 16,000 individual locks.

It's a monumental task.

"I started at the lock shop about 14 years ago," says Handy. "At that time, of course, there was no electronic card access. We used to have cores on the front doors of a high-rise, and you'd have 300 keys out to that one lock. When a key got lost, we had to change the lock, and 300 students had to come to my office to get new keys."

Lost keys are the eternal bane of a locksmith. The truth is that students have a lot of things on their minds, and keeping track of their keys isn't always one of them.

That's why the housing department quickly moved to stand-alone access control for the outside doors of the buildings. The first stand-alone system was added about a decade ago and was attached to simple electric door strikes.

"Then we wanted to add door prop alarms, but the system wouldn't support them the way we wanted it done," recalls Handy. "We swapped out and used another system. We kept adding doors, and pretty soon we were up to about a hundred doors. Every time we added a new area, we received an updated version of the printed circuit boards - they kept changing on us. Then you could never get parts to the older versions."

To make matters worse, because it was a stand-alone system, if a card was lost, it required personnel to go to the location and change the system so that card would no longer work. The practice could pose problems for an institution made up of numerous separate colleges.

"A residence college means you can go around and see your professor or friends in the buildings," said Handy. "One card worked at all seven buildings. If a student lost that card and it was reported to us, we immediately had to walk to all seven buildings. It took about an hour. If another student called, you had to turn around and do the same thing." It was not a good use of manpower and time. The university moved to an integrated system of card readers controlled from a central computer in the lock shop.

The first opportunity to try out the new approach came when the system installed in one of the dorms, crashed and parts were unavailable to repair it.

That's when Handy turned to Indianapolis-based Best Access Systems.

A few years before, Best had begun marketing the B.A.S.I.S. (Best Access Systems Integrated Solutions) 64 NT system. This system incorporates the OnGuard Access Control System developed by Pittsford, N.Y.-based Lenel Systems International Inc.

"They have keyless entry for the perimeter doors of the residence halls," explains Dave Naber, a systems consultant in Best's Maidens, Va. office. "Students have a mag stripe card that is issued by housing. It works in their dorm, but not in other dorms. We're starting to install some locks because the laundry facility and computer labs are located in the housing area. We're starting to install access control on the computer lab doors and the laundry doors. From an administration point of view, we will provide more access for students because, obviously, laundry and computer labs are open to more students than those living in those particular halls."

So far, 84 doors have been equipped with card readers. An additional eight exit-only doors are simply being monitored.

The doors are equipped with dual-switch electric strikes provided by Best. One micro-switch monitors the latch while the other keeps tabs on whether the latch is locked.

"We also have magnetic contacts in every door so each one has three alarm points," says Handy. "We monitor these points on the Lenel System."

A BAS-1000 Intelligent System Controller capable of supporting 32 devices maintains the card readers.

"If my computer crashes, it cuts itself off from the controller board and the controller board retains the information," says Handy. "It will operate until it establishes a connection again to the main system. When it's reconnected, it automatically downloads all the information that happened while it was disconnected."

If a reader goes off-line, the reader retains the memory of the facility code being used and will recognize the card's facility code. A downside is that a card deleted while the reader is in the off-line mode will still work.

"Still that's better than everyone being locked out," says Handy.

Using a laptop computer and simple dial-up modem, Handy can communicate with the system from his home nearly 25 miles away, thus saving countless trips from home.

The system also gives officials unprecedented knowledge about the comings and goings of cardholders - both those entitled to the cards and those who aren't.

"You can go back and see who is going in where," says Handy. "You can trace a card. You can trace a reader. You can trace a panel. You can generate reports. There are 88 different reports you can run."

The cards issued by the housing department are designed solely to admit students to dorm buildings. The university is considering a future move to adopt a universal ID card.

All outside doors are on the system. At the lock shop, the central computer is monitored during regular business hours. However, nobody is likely to get away with propping a door open or taping a lock back late at night. A high-decibel alarm is installed near each door, and failure to close the entrance will set it off, alerting residence hall staff to do something.

"It stays in an alarm mode until the door is closed," says Handy. "The door must be shut or the duct tape must be pulled off the latch for the alarm to shut off automatically. I will get a report on it. The residence staff in the building understands that when an alarm goes off, they must check the door."

The system enables Handy to set various expiration dates for each card he issues.

"I just program the cards to terminate on a certain date. Instead of cutting a reader off, this year I can set up holidays and time zones and set the students' cards to stop working at the exact date and time I want. The employees' cards will still be hot," says Handy. "You can go in and set up different classes of cards. You could set up an employee's card to expire in five years. You could add a student's to expire on May 13. You could also define a badge as a visitor, which would expire in 24 hours. You can designate a badge as temporary, which expires in 30 days. There are different levels or degrees you can assign to these badges, and the level you assign determines when the badge expires."

Handy runs monthly reports on which cards are about to expire. He also keeps close tabs on unusual uses - or lack of use of cards.

"In the morning when I go in, if I see a particular card going in to different doors trying to get into different places, I'll take the access levels off that card," he explains. "It tells me the student lost the card and didn't report it. Now someone has found that card and is trying to find out where it goes."

In addition, if he finds that a card has not been used for an unusually long period of time, he can assume the card has probably been lost and needs to be deactivated.

Approximately 400 cards are lost each year. In addition, the housing staff is forced to change more than 1,000 locks annually due to lost keys.

Keeping up with such a large and transitory population is a challenge for any organization. Thanks to the integration provided by computer technology, the University of Virginia's Housing Department has made the job a little bit easier.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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