According to research by the Home Office, university students are far more likely than the national average to become victims of crime with opportunist thefts and burglary being the most commonly reported offences.

This is frequently due to the fact that for many young people, further education is their first experience of looking after themselves and living away from home. Consequently, they usually have little background knowledge of or experience of crime reduction measures. Most crimes are of an opportunist nature with the most frequent involving the theft of wallets, purses, bags, jackets and money from office areas, especially desks, drawers and lockers. But, of more concern is the problem of burglary. Thieves know that many students own high-value portable items such as laptop computers, i-pods, mobile phones and DVD players which can be easily sold on for cash and so this can make their rooms an easy target for property crime.

One university where the threat of crime is being taken very seriously is the University of Oxford. The oldest university in the English-speaking world, Oxford can lay claim to nine centuries of continuous existence and is determined to do all it can to protect its students. To help achieve this one of the youngest and smallest of the University’s 39 colleges, Mansfield College, has invested in an electronic access control system that has already resulted in a big reduction in campus crime.

Occupying one of the most attractive sites in Oxford, in a quiet position close to the Bodleian Library, River Cherwell and University parks, Mansfield College was established in 1886 and is renowned for combining the best of traditional Oxford with its own unique and innovative personality. The College admits students over a broad range of subjects and the student membership at any one time usually consists of 200 undergraduates, 70 graduates and 35 visiting students.

‘Oxford is, in general, a very safe city in which to live and study. However, burglary is a real problem in Oxford andit is important for our students to be aware of the need for personal security and crime prevention and to know that we are working closely with Oxfordshire Police to help us keep our campuses safe places to live and work’ says Mansfield College Head of Maintenance Tony Berezny. ‘With several other colleges at the University already using SALTO for their access control requirements we wantedto upgrade our own levels of security protection and sodecided to evaluate the technology for our own use. Havingdone this and found it offered pretty much everything we were looking for, we decided to introduce the system in

Mansfield College starting with just our external doors initially to see how users would adapt to it as it is quite different to our previous conventional keyed system. The actual technology itself was extremely simple to install and local SALTO business partner BMA Varsity Ltd, Oxfordshire’s leading locksmiths, carried out the job, installing 8 on-line WRM2000 wall readers controlled by i-Button read/write keys and a mix of electronic handle sets from the Comfort and Security ranges. This was all very straightforward with no undue problems despite the age and condition of some of the doors and their architectural surroundings.’

SALTO’s PRO-Access electronic locking system was also installed at the college to provide real-time on-line perimeter access control. This enables all the doors to be operated by one database (although it is powerful enough to control the entire campus if necessary) managing the intelligent electronic locks and i-Button keys for stand alone wirefree operation. All updating of the locks is achieved via the software with virtual on-line performance provided by theSALTO Virtual Network (SVN). This is a smart combination of on-line and stand alone readers that provide 90% of the benefits of a fully on-line access control system but without such a system’s attendant high costs.

The new access system was very quickly embraced by the students and staff at the college and the installation hasalready been expanded to include bedrooms in the studentaccommodation block and also to individual office doors,giving them control over a total of some 102 doors in amixture of on-line and off-line formats. These are currentlyaccessed via 550 i-Buttons in circulation with staff andstudents at the college.Ramesh Gurdev, one of SALTO’s UK Area Sales Managers comments: ‘The capability of multi-site growth built into the system has been key for the university offering them futurecompatibility and product longevity. They now have allexternal doors networked so that they have real time audit and instant management capability as well as these doors acting as the hotspot data transfer points. The flexibility of the read/write i-Button means that an ergonomic androbust fob type key can be used for data transfer within thesystem.

Tony Berezny concludes: ‘The University of Oxford andMansfield College in particular enjoys a relatively low rate ofcrime and we are working hard to keep it that way. We aredetermined that students and staff should continue to feelsafe and that their property is protected.We have found that SALTO has been invaluable in crimereduction and it has really improved the security of the campus. It has been fault free from day one and we planto expand the system on an annual basis as  our budget permits.’