MCC College Safety enters Digital world

You may have seen odd looking orbs located inside some of the MCC (both campuses) buildings, or attached to parking lot poles, or roofs of buildings.

As part of the 1994 bond campaign, dollars were set aside for safety and security. MCC has utilized these funds to build a comprehensive radio network for the college safety personnel and a new digital video surveillance network.

The MCC College Safety and ITS departments, in conjunction with Millenium 3 Technologies, have built a state of the art IP based digital video surveillance network and upgraded the communications capabilities of the entire College Safety office. The fiber optic and wireless network was developed using products from Cisco systems. It  allows network cameras to send digital ‘video’ to a device called a DVR, or digital video recorder.  To use a consumer metaphor, this DVR operates just like a TIVO.  These digital video recorders take the video feeds from all the cameras, The video traffic is monitored at specially configured workstations in the College Safety offices.  Special plasma displays in the offices allow for the monitoring of as many as 16 cameras simultaneously.

The video footage is archived for 2-3 weeks so, in the event of any criminal or unusual activity, the footage can be replayed and analyzed for evidence. 

One of the key features of this new network is the ability to turn almost any workstation into a video  enabled command center. So in the event of an emergency, video traffic from cameras can be viewed in the field, rather than just by sitting in front of a monitor in a control room.