The ID Card: What Happens When You Swipe?

Without your Harvard identification card, you could go to class, but that's about it.

Without an ID card, there would be no access to dormitories, dining halls or libraries; no Crimson Cash or BoardPlus.

So how did this wonderful innovation come about? The saga of the ID card begins eight years ago, in the nether region of the Yard known as "the Union dorms."

In the Beginning...

Director of Physical Resources Michael N. Lichten, who was involved in the keycard implementation process "from the very start," says only Greenough, Hurlbut, Pennypacker and one of the chemistry buildings featured card readers in 1991.

"We wanted to see how it was going to work and what kinds of problems it was going to cause," he says.

Luckily, Lichten says the keycard experiment proved to be a success.

"People were already getting used to card access at bank ATMs," he explains. "And by 1992, we got the whole Yard going."

After that, Lichten says keycard readers were added to two or three Houses and several academic buildings each summer.

The system met with approval from both students and parents, Lichten says, because it increased their sense of campus safety.

Prior to the advent of ID cards, incoming College students were issued a room key, a mailbox key and an entryway or dorm key, Lichten says. If an entryway key was lost, the locks had to be changed and every student in the entryway issued a new key.

However, the ID card changed all that.

Lichten says the keycard system also made administrators' lives easier by allowing them to expand or restrict access to different buildings at different times of the year, depending on the need.

"When the term is over, we can change the access, get cleaning done quickly, prepare for reunions and summer school," he says. "Then we can change it back in September for incoming freshmen."

Don't Leave Home Without It

The keycard system serves many functions for the typical Harvard student.

Crimson Cash and BoardPlus, which are both run by Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS), allow Harvard ID holders to encode financial information onto their cards.

Crimson Cash can be used at select locations on or off-campus to purchase books, food, photocopies and snacks, while BoardPlus credits students' cards with $50 each semester for food and snacks.

Students say these keycard features have contributed to the quality of College life.

"I find [Crimson Cash] very useful," Patricia S. Cho '99 says.

Thomas M. Coyne '02 adds, "It's easier than using coins for laundry and sodas."

In addition, student groups such as The Crimson or Harvard Student Agencies take advantage of the ID card system by allowing only staff members whose keycard numbers have been encoded into the buildings' security systems to enter their respective buildings. (Both organizations are independent of the University.)

Lichten says new uses for the keycard system continue to surface. For example, he points to the "proximity readers" located outside certain buildings, which were erected to help disabled people gain easier access into University buildings.

"People just need to get the card close to the special reader, and that will unlock the door," Lichten says. "Someone in a wheelchair or who has a disability with their hands won't have to get the card out and swipe it."

How It All Works

When you swipe your ID card anywhere on campus, the reader extracts your ID number from the magnetic strip on the back and sends it to a server to determine authentication.

"Crimson Cash and door privileges do not sit on the cards themselves," says Jeffrey B. Cuppett, HUDS manager of card application technologies. "Every time you go to the Coop or Loker to make a transaction there, it queries our server, and it tells our server whether to let you in [to the sys tem]," he says.

According to Cuppett, Harvard University Identification and Data Services (HUID) maintains student information and updates the HUDS and House access servers on a regular basis.

These servers control access to their particular systems via a computer network.

Cuppett says the ID network and equipment are provided by AT&T-Campus Wide Access Solutions.

"Almost every college across the country has one of these systems," he says. "About 175 have the same system from AT&T."

Cuppett says HUDS maintains four separate accounts for each student on its server.

"You have your count account that counts you at the dining halls, you have a Crimson Cash account, and you have a vending shadow account," he says.

The shadow account is an account within Crimson Cash that limits vending machine transactions to $25 per day, he explains.

When you swipe in at a dining hall, the cardswiper queries the HUDS server and gets your meal balance and permission information, Cuppett says.

For undergraduates on the regular meal plan, the meal balance reflects the number of meals eaten that week, and there is no limit to the number of times you may swipe in, he says.

"Your count account resets on Sunday at 12 a.m.," Cuppett says. "There is no technological level imposed on the system" regarding the number of meals undergraduates may eat.

However, graduate students and other students on limited meal plans start the week with meal counts that decline as meals are taken, he says.

Once you are authenticated by the system, the swipe machine emits a loud sound--one beep for first-years and a series of beeps for upper-class students.

According to Cuppett, the long beep sequence for upper-class students was implemented to allow dining hall checkers to see the students' house affiliations on-screen so that students and dining hall staff could get to know one another.

Plus, "the number of freshmen and the constraints of moving them through the dining halls fast" prevented HUDS from giving first-years a long-beep sequence, too.

What About the Cards?

David R. Wamback, coordinator of ID cards and information retrieval for HUID, says, "The general `Harvard Card' is pre-printed with a specific design. We use a DataCard 9000 machine to `personalize' each card. It is a modular system that a) encodes the mag-stripe and tests the encoding, b) adds graphics such as the bar-code, faculty and general role, c) prints an image of the individual using a dye sublimation process, d) adds a protective coating, e) embosses the card with the ID number, name, and faculty code, and finally, f) coats the embossing for readability."

"This is done at a rate of 500 cards per hour for bulk issue," Wamback says. "Without this machine, it would be impossible to meet the demands of the University for machine-readable photo cards without tripling both the personnel and the space in this office."

"The average cost per card is approximately $3.50 per card plus labor," Wamback adds.

Students are required to pay considerably larger fees to replace lost cards, but do not have to pay for stolen or broken cards.

"If a card is stolen, and the student files a police report specifically indicating that the card was stolen and presents a copy of that report, the student will not be charged," Wamback reports. "We have no desire to charge a student who has been victimized. If the student so wishes, we will take a new image before the card is reissued. The same is true for broken cards that have not been abused."

Plus, unlike ATM cards, students don't have to worry about the magnetic strip being erased.

"Harvard cards are much more resistant to erasure than ATM cards," Wamback says. "The only time we've heard of an erasure was in an MRI. Any card can be worn out, but that too is a very unusual because the annual expiration and replacement schedule for all cards minimizes any negative impact on convenience. Failure rates are therefore extremely low."

But in case you are planning to save your card forever, Wamback says that "all cards of this type...will break between two and three years because of the hardening tendency inherent in this kind of plastic."

Switching the System

According to Lichten, universal keycard access looms as a distinct possibility in the near future.

Most card readers are set up to accommodate only the residents of a particular House or dorm, Lichten says, meaning that the switch to universal access would mandate a memory increase in many of the older readers. However, Lichten says that some of the newer systems are capable of handling the increased swipe load without modification.

Take, for example, Quincy House, which has been experimenting with universal access since late-October, the longest time period for any House.

"The main doors at Quincy had been sized to accommodate the 400 students," Lichten says. "With the possibility of 6,500 students, the system needed more memory."

In most cases, such a memory upgrade is all that is needed to convert a door panel to universal access.

Cynthia Langille, Yard Operations and Access Control Systems Coordinator for FAS Physical Resources, says that in Houses with more recently-installed card readers, switching to universal access simply means making technical changes to an already existant system rather than adding equipment.

"We've had requests for equipment upgrades, but we haven't installed new equipment specifically for universal access," she says.

Both Langille and Lichten say the switch is "not a big deal," and Lichten adds that "it's something that has to be done."

Lichten also says the cost of the switch is not, nor should it be, part of the equation.

"The switch should be driven by the policy," he says. "We're trying t be able to support whatever policy the College feels in necessary."

And despite any increased financial or technical investment , Lichten says universal access in "a great tool."

Safe, Not Sorry

In addition to requiring a modification of existing systems, universal access has touched off a debate about safety and security concerns across campus.

In November, two prints loaned to Quincy House by the Fogg Art Museum were stolen from Quincy's Griswold Room after the "Bare as You Dare Dance," engendering some concern that universal access might have left the House more vulnerable .

But Quincy House Master Michael Shinagel Stresses that the publicized theft is completely unrelated to the newly-implemented universal access system.

"So far, the students all seem to like it," he says. "So far, so good."

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 says he, too, in delighted that more and more Houses are experimenting with universal access and don't see the system as a safety hazard.

"I don't consider it a violation of the 'two locked doors' policy to give a Harvard undergraduate with a valid keycard direct access to an entryway or a floor of another House," Lewis says.

"The policy means than there should be two locked doors between a student's bedroom and the street, not two locked doors between a Lowellian and a Kirklandian, for example."

Joy J. Liu '99, a resident of Eliot House, adds, "Can't we all just trust each other?"