By sheer numbers, the urban campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is impressive: The campus is frequented by roughly 53,000 students, staff and visitors on a daily basis; is home to 11 million books, the largest public university library collection in the country; boasts 14 major sporting facilities, 17 colleges and instructional units; and employs 11 Nobel laureates and 18 Pulitzer Prize winners as part of its faculty.

Situated between the twin cities of Urbana and Champaign, a joint community of about 180,000, the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system is the size of a small city. With more than 400 main facilities on campus, the 55-member police department has a lot of ground to cover.

"One detective had so many software programs running on his computer to manage all the different video systems that his computer wouldn't work," said Detective Tim Hetrick of the University of Illinois Police Department Technical Services division.

"If security is decentralised on a major university then police cannot use that system to its maximum capacity," Police Chief Barbara O'Connor said. "We have developed a policy where anyone on campus purchasing a camera system must have it approved by the chief of police."

The solution was a gradual, three- to five-year deployment of roughly 4,500 cameras that would be managed in a central location using a single video management platform, the Milestone Xprotect Corporate.

All new installations will be managed by Milestone XProtect Corporate, an IP-based video software system that centralises the surveillance system management into a single, easy-to-use solution. Because the software is capable of integrating with more than 80 different video surveillance vendors, individual departments can select head end equipment that fits their needs and budget, without worrying about integration issues with the Milestone software.

The vast majority of network cameras are provided by Axis Communications. The projects underway now range anywhere from 6 cameras to about 70 cameras in size and feature a mixture of fixed, megapixel and pan/tilt/zoom cameras.

Each department at the University of Illinois at Urbana also retains the ability to monitor its own video, although Chief Barbara O'Connor's policy is that video is also fed directly back to the police dispatch center over the campus' fibre backbone, where on-duty dispatchers can view live video or access archived events. Administration rights are also centralised at the dispatch centre, handled by a dedicated police department staffer tasked with Milestone system management, including software updates, access rights and other associated tasks. All police officers as well as the university's telecommunications/IT staff will also be trained on the software.

"Making the argument for surveillance cameras can be particularly tough in the higher education environment, but the efficacy of the Milestone system helped to make the case to campus administrators," says Chief O'Connor.