TECHNOLOGY PLAN
for the
TOWN of CHAPEL HILL
Prepared by the Citizens’ Technology Committee
Peter Calingaert
Joel Dunn
William Groves, chair
Doug Noell
Roscoe Reeve
Penny Rich
Alan Rimer
Richard Taylor
Participating Town Staff
Robert Avery
Mark Bayles
Robert Bosworth
Scott Cantrell
Jane Cousins
Terry Gearhart
Kay Johnson
William Terry
Council Liaison
Kevin Foy
CONTENTS
B. NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE 5
C. WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT 11
E. GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM 27
F. RECORDS MANAGEMENT 33
G. RADIO COMMUNICATIONS 39
H. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY GROUP 47
APPENDICES
I. WILL LIBRARIES SURVIVE? 51
II. WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF GIS? 58
III. OVERVIEW OF TRUNKING RADIO 59
IV. CONDITION OF THE TOWN RADIO SYSTEM 64
V. STATEWIDE PLANS FOR TRUNKING RADIO 64
Two years ago Chapel Hill Town Council chartered the Citizens’ Technology Committee (CTC) to give advice concerning technological matters. Currently the Committee comprises eight citizens, eight Town staff members, and one Council liaison. Since its inception, the Committee has met regularly once each month. A year ago the Committee decided to develop a strategic plan to help guide the Town in its technology implementation. To this end, between October 1999 and February 2000, the head of each Town department was interviewed. From this process, seven key areas were identified for deeper study. From March 2000 through October 2000 different Committee members chaired small subcommittees, including Town staff, to prepare a written plan for each of these areas. The major recommendations are listed below. To date, no estimate has been made of the cost to implement these recommendations, but during the next three months the Committee will make such estimates.
Since 1996, computing and data service demands have grown faster than infrastructure improvements. There are various data systems in place that will not support e-government style services. Technology goals and system standards should be established that will guide planning and procurement for information services. The initiatives are:
· Adopt replacement cycle for servers and establish centralized funding to support it.
· Increase wide area networking speed.
· Conduct engineering evaluation to determine proper electrical power supply and backup support requirements for centralized in-house computer equipment.
· Adopt database standard for major systems. Upgrades and replacements to existing programs should be evaluated for potential conversion.
· Join with neighboring communities and governmental/educational entities to explore options for high speed networking services for both business and residential customers.
2. Web Site Development
Town’s Web site will evolve into one-stop access point for citizen, business, and inter-governmental transactions. Steps to achieve transformation include:
· Centralize Web-site management.
· Provide standards for information software and hardware, and train personnel to keep site up-to-date efficiently.
· Obtain outside expertise to develop integrated, easily managed and easily accessed site.
· Provide for telephone or other technologies that will provide access to citizens who do not have easy Web access.
· Evaluate expansion of electronicservices including licensing, class sign-ups, development proposals, and fee collections.
Library Needs Assessment Report says Chapel Hill Public Library has “woefully deficient technology program.” Library’s current positioning in new technology is and will continue to be dependent on statewide services explored and implemented by State Library.
· Traditional library services must expand to include new technology. Information offered only in digital format needs to be included in Library's collections. Digitization will be heavy financial burden for Library. Additional staff are needed.
· Needs include additional network bandwidth, full-time on-site technology coordinator, dynamic Web site, training room, and subscriptions to variety of electronic publications and databases.
4. Geographic Information System (GIS)
GIS will be an important decision support tool for Town offices and Council in monitoring and evaluating development and in delivering Town services.
· Network improvements should be made so GIS is available to all staff to identify locations, facilities and parcels. Town can develop its own GIS Internet site or link to Orange County site.
· Hire programmer/analyst for advanced GIS applications.
Currently, Town staff manage records across a mixture of data platforms that includes digitally developed manuscripts, hand written forms, videotapes, audiotapes, and blueprints. At present there are no Town-wide standards regarding records retention, nor how documents should be produced, stored, and archived. Two major initiatives have been identified:
· Develop Document Management Program for processing, filing, and storing all Town documents.
· Determine how best to engage available resources to implement findings of structured process identified above
6. Radio Communications
· Current radio communications system used by Town has several problems:
§ Obtaining parts to repair the system is becoming increasingly difficult.
· An 800-MHz radio system is needed for all Town and County Emergency units. Town should plan for prompt implementation of countywide 800-MHz trunking radio system for voice communications.
· Establish cross-department planning team and budgeting process.
·
Remove ITG from Finance Department and have ITG report to Town management.
· ITG needs additional positions to meet needs for (1) helpdesk and training; (2) network and server technology support; (3) programming for Web-based services; (4) clerical support , and (5) communications technology support.
· To provide budgetary accountability, ITG should function as cost center and charge user departments for services.
· To expedite system changes and contain cost, ITG should contract with outside vendors for new services.
B. NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE
· The Town established basic networking services in 1996. Since then, computing and data service demands have grown faster than infrastructure improvements. The Town has taken steps to improve network equipment and services and has several initiatives in progress. These initiatives should continue.
· The Town does not have a specific plan for technology and information services. As a result, there are various data systems in place that will not support e-government style services. The Town needs to establish technology goals and system standards that will guide planning and procurement for information services.
· The Town’s infrastructure for network and information services lacks a number of features necessary to support the increased demand for services. The Town should establish an infrastructure model that provides support for services, facilities, personnel, and planning.
· The Town does not have a long-range plan for acquiring high-speed data network services for town facilities; nor have any plans been developed to ensure the provision of low-cost data services to residents. The CTC recommends that the Town explore options for future development of high-speed data services both within the Town and in conjunction with neighboring communities.
In 1996, the Town installed a networking infrastructure that included a Local Area Network (LAN) for Town Hall and a Wide Area Network (WAN) that connected six remote department sites with Town Hall. This provided all departments with access to servers for e-mail, document processing, and financial management. A connection to the Internet was provided for access to other governmental agencies. The WAN joined together several existing department networks (Police, Public Works, and Transportation), thus requiring standardization of networking procedures and equipment.
The initial network supported about 120 users using Ethernet LAN technology (10 megabits/second (Mbps)) and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) telephone WAN connections (64 kilobits/second (Kbps)). Since the initial installation, the number of Town employees using computers for e-mail and access to other services has grown to more than 500, the number of computers has more than doubled, and the network traffic demands of server based applications has outstripped the capacity of the Town’s network.
Several steps have already been taken to accommodate past growth and to better manage future growth in the areas of networking equipment, services, and procurement planning.
Networking Equipment. To improve the Town’s ability to handle network applications, improved servers have been added, LAN equipment supporting 100 Mbps is being installed, and the WAN is being shifted to Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL) technology that will provide 384 Kbps between sites (with capability for 1.1 Mbps between sites).
Services. To improve services for citizen access to information, the Town’s Web site is dual hosted on commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) servers as well as Town servers. The Town’s Internet access speed has been increased to 1.1 Mbps by using SDSL services.
Procurement Planning. To improve management and support, the procurement process for computers has been shifted to a centrally controlled budget fund that supports a three-year life cycle for desktop computers. Procurement of commonly used desktop software is conducted through a centralized process using State information technology contracts and services. This has lowered cost and provided uniformity in desktop software. Additionally, the Town has added two employees over the past three years to provide user and application support.
Current short-range plans for network systems include moderate enhancements to equipment and software to support expansion of Web-based applications.
Several departments have specific plans for upgrading networked services. For example, the Police Department is upgrading the Police records database software and is implementing mobile data terminal capability for 15 police cars; the Public Works Department is planning to upgrade the vehicle maintenance database software; the Library is planning to implement Internet access to the card catalog system; and the Finance Department is planning to enhance the Town’s Web site.
Other departments have projects and plans for upgrading and enhancing services that are in various stages of planning and budgeting. Some of these projects, such as implementation of on-line access to Recreation Department activity registration or Inspection Department permit applications, require a significant investment in both the software and the hardware necessary to support the on-line operations.
3 ISSUES
Although the Town network currently supports roughly 250 computers, 500 users, 10 remote departmental sites, and 15 different database software programs, there is no consolidated Town plan for long-range technology goals. Each department plans technology and database improvements independently. A few long-range projects are included in the Capital Improvements Plan (CIP).
A comprehensive technology plan is needed to identify future applications and services, so that the appropriate infrastructure requirements can be determined.
Enhancing or converting existing services into an effective form of “e-government” style service that accommodates support for “e-capable” citizens as well as conventional walk-in and telephone citizens will require changes to more than network services. The process may require changes to organizational administration and support, work-related job skills, and facilities.
Need for Town-wide Information Technology Standards
The Town needs to adopt enterprise-standard technology architecture. The need for such an architecture is especially apparent for upgrading or replacing databases. The requirements, for example, should include conformance to Web-based applications and relational database applications.
Need for High-speed Data Services for Town Sites
Using SDSL technology for wide area network services will provide a short period in which existing data applications will survive. Within a very few years, however, advances in hardware and software applications will require higher speed connections. The Town should begin the process of acquiring access to high-speed data services. In addition, the Town should look for community-wide opportunities to enhance citizen access and reduce overall costs.
Need for Community Effort to Provide High-speed Data Services for Citizens
Lack of citizen access to high-speed (and low-cost) data services is a problem affecting most communities the size of Chapel Hill. Cable modem, satellite services, and SDSL services are the only options, but they are not available to all residents. Even if they were, the cost would be prohibitive for many residents. The Town should join with neighboring communities to explore opportunities for lowering cost and expanding service options.
The Town should continue the initiatives-in-progress that are listed in Section 2.
The Town should establish comprehensive information technology architecture for adding and improving technology-related services within the Town. It should establish a process for reviewing and modifying the architecture at regular and frequent intervals. Because technology innovations cannot be anticipated, the plans should be responsive to product and pricing changes.
Although the charge to this subcommittee was focused on network infrastructure issues, deliberations exposed the need for an architecture that addresses technology standards. For example, network infrastructure bandwidth requirements are driven by the number and types of applications offered. Are the applications workstation-centric? Are the applications server-centric? What bandwidth demands do they place on the network backbone? What are the user and system support demands that they generate?
The Town should establish an infrastructure model that addresses the various components of the Town’s networking structure. For purposes of addressing the Town’s needs, these have been divided into four categories.
Systems Infrastructure – Network servers, desktop computers, and software
Current status: The Town currently has 250 desktop computers and 22 servers, and is in the process of converting desktop and server operating systems to Windows 2000. The Town has adopted a replacement cycle for 204 desktop computers for General Fund supported departments.
Recommendation: Adopt a replacement cycle for servers and associated operating system software, and establish centralized funding to support it.
Connectivity Infrastructure – Network wiring and remote site connection (speed and bandwidth capability).
Current status: The Town uses Ethernet local area networking with a combination of 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps equipment. The Internet connection uses digital subscriber system technology and provides 1.1 Mbps. Wide-area networking connections are being converted to digital subscriber system technology and will provide 384 Kbps.
Recommendation: The Town should adopt 100 Mbps as the standard for local area networking. The wide area networking speeds should be increased to 1.1 Mbps when feasible.
Facilities Infrastructure – Suitability of computer and network facilities for electrical power and environmental control
Current status: The Town’s main computer and network room is located in Town Hall. Electrical power and environmental support are adequate for normal operation of existing equipment. There is no capability for supplying power during long-term outages and no provision for power filtering to electronic devices. An emergency power generator is slated for installation at Town Hall later this year, but it is not known whether computing systems will be supported.
Recommendation: The Town should conduct an engineering evaluation to determine the proper electrical power supply and backup support requirements.
Application Infrastructure – Development of enterprise standards for network hardware and application software.
Current status: The Town has a standard policy for operating systems software and common desktop application software. The Town uses 18 different database software programs, but has not adopted preferred database application software. Most of the current database applications are not based on structured query language (SQL).
Recommendation: The Town should adopt SQL database programs as the preferred standard for major systems. Upgrades and replacements to existing programs should be evaluated for potential conversion.
The Town should join with neighboring communities and governmental/educational entities to explore options for high-speed networking services for both business and residential users.
Technology advances occur so frequently that plans can become quickly outdated, impractical, or uneconomical to implement. The Town should strive to adhere to industry-standard applications and equipment insofar as is practical, so that a wide range of alternative resources is available.
High-speed network connections between Town Hall and remote departmental sites such as Police, Public Works, and Transportation would greatly aid in development and implementation of data services such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Currently, frame relay and digital subscriber line technology are the only economical choices for the town’s network connections. Fiber networks offer a much greater bandwidth for data transmission but at a much higher cost.
C. WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT
Over time, the Town’s Web sites will evolve into a one-stop access point for citizen, business, and inter-governmental transactions. The pace of the transformation will be determined by the costs and benefits of each successive improvement. In the short-term, the Town needs to centralize its management of the site, obtain outside expertise to develop an integrated, easily managed and easily accessed site, provide standards for Town information software and hardware, and train personnel to keep the site up-to-date efficiently. Over the longer term, the Town needs to evaluate the costs and benefits of a variety of possible services including, for example, licensing, class sign-ups, development proposals, and fee collections. At every stage of development, the Town needs to provide for telephone or other technologies that will furnish access to citizens who do not have easy Web access; and the Town will need to educate its staff and citizens about the improved access to Town information and processes.
Government is being transformed by information technology, and the Web site is the focal point of the transformation. Web sites, which began as information, presentation, and retrieval systems, will be evolving into a one-stop access point for citizen, business and inter-governmental transactions. The transformation will take time and money and will eventually result in significant changes to the information workflows in government and to the culture and nature of work for many employees. The Town will need to determine how quickly it wants to adapt to the changing government model, evaluating the costs and benefits of each incremental step. At the same time, the Town will also need to use improved telephone technologies to ensure quality services to citizens with and without easy access to the Internet.
The evolution of government information technology can be arranged into four stages.
· Stage 1 – Web presence for information, presentation, and retrieval
· Stage 2 – Citizen interactions including searches, e-mail, and e-forms
· Stage 3 – Program and business transactions, e.g. licenses, permits, and reservations
· Stage 4 – Government transformation offering an access point for digital democracy providing universal, round-the-clock government access for information services
The Town Web site was established in 1995 to provide a means to disseminate Town information already available in another form. Over time it has evolved and has the potential to become a focal point for Town business and information.
Currently, the Town has two Web sites, one within the Town network and one external Web site hosted by an independent service provider. The intent was to develop one site primarily for staff information and internal workflows and one for information and transactions for citizens, businesses, and other interested parties. Although the provision for two sites does improve access speed and security, the sites currently have similar information.
The information on the sites has been assembled as staff have been able to adapt Town documents or, in a few cases, contracted to have Town documents adapted. Given the limited staff time and the minimal availability of contractual assistance, the central sites have evolved slowly and have not been materially reorganized since inception. Within the last year some departments, Planning and Transportation for example, have been able to arrange for independent Web development, but that development has not been coordinated with other information on the sites.
The Town Web sites are largely at Stage 1 of government information technology, offering information and some retrieval capabilities. There is minimal capacity for searches and e-mail.
1. How should Web information be managed?
2. What is the minimum standard for the Town Web site and what is the best balance between in-house development and hired expert development to achieve that level?
3. What is the right pace to making service enhancements and what is the cost/benefit of each proposed level of service improvements?
1. How should Web information be managed?
There is minimal cost associated with making certain management changes to improve the presentation and functioning of the Town Web site. These include the following.
· Centralize planning and budgeting for network-related functions.
· Implement enterprise-level standards for documents and databases.
· Establish enterprise-wide publishing capacity.
2. What is the minimum standard for the Town Web site and what is the best balance between in-house development and hired expert development to achieve that level?
With a fairly modest investment, the Town can achieve Stage 2 Web sites that permit searches, forms, and simple communications among staff, citizens, businesses, and other governments as they relate to Town government. The Town would need to take the following steps to achieve this level of service.
· Acquire outside expertise to “jump-start” a redesign of our Web sites with the following objectives.
• Redesign the sites to reflect the Town’s vision and personality
• Provide the following services for all Town departments:
• General Town services descriptions
• Citizen inquiry and response capability
• Internal and external forms on-line
• Consistent search capability
• Map access on-line
• Parking ticket appeal
• Streamline the update process and introduce the use of automated tools for maintenance
• Design standard style templates and graphics
• Define requirements for on-line access to and submission of forms, both internal and external
• Identify tools to track standard Web statistics to effectively monitor site activity
· Train Town Webmaster to maintain redesigned site
· Train Town personnel to prepare documents in Web-compatible formats and to efficiently update Web information
3. What is the right pace to making service enhancements and what is the cost/benefit of each proposed level of service improvements?
· After basic Web site redesign to bring the Town Web sites to Stage 2, consider which Stage 3 projects, if any, to incorporate into the Web sites. These enterprise-type projects include the following:
• Recreation sign-ups on-line
• Inspections and permits on-line
• Historic governance and planning document access on-line
• Mobile access for departments
The long-term goal for the Town Web sites is to transform Town government communications and services for citizens, businesses, employees and other governments. Specific applications for future Web site development fall into two categories: enhancement of current services, and expansion of current services.
Service enhancements to get the Town to Stage 2 Web sites have been addressed in Section 4. Expansions of services include the following:
· Building permit process
· Inspections, engineering, and other permit processes
· Recreation activity sign-ups
· Fee payment by credit card
· GIS (see Section E)
· Library catalogue
· Development applications
· Business licensing
In order to provide these Web site expansions, the Town will need to take the following steps:
· Evaluate the cost/benefit of integrating program and business transactions.
· Select and implement the projects that meet service and budgetary criteria.
· Provide hardware and system software to meet the operational needs of the Web sites, or contract for equivalent services.
· Establish a consistent web design for users to transact business with the Town.
· Provide a common standard for shared database infrastructure.
· Integrate expansion projects into the Town’s databases and GIS system to provide the ability to perform transactions without staff intervention.
· Continue to capture the image of the Town of Chapel Hill as an efficient, effective government.
· Continue to provide alternative methods for access to Town information for those who do not have Web access.
· Train personnel within departments to produce the materials to keep the Web sites up-to-date.
· Re-assign some personnel from jobs or portions of jobs that are technologically outdated.
Lack of the following:
· Centralized planning and budgeting for network-related functions
· Enterprise-level standards for documents and databases
· Expertise to organize and develop a consistently designed and easily navigable site
· Trained Webmaster to maintain redesigned site
· Trained Town personnel to prepare documents in Web-compatible and Web-centered formats
· Traditional library services will expand to include new technology but will not be replaced by technology. Books will still remain the primary form for recreational, leisure reading.
· Information offered only in digital format will need to be included in library collections.
· Librarians will continue to be organizers of the increasingly vast amount of information available both in traditional and in new, digitized formats.
· Patrons have varying levels of expertise, requiring highly trained information professionals to locate and evaluate reliable information.
· Digitization will be a heavy financial burden for all libraries. Significant private and public support will be needed if libraries are to support demands for “informatization.”
· Because the CHPL is already heavily used (Library staff members check out 50% more books per capita than the NC state average), additional staff will be needed to support additional services.
· The recent report of the Library Needs Assessment Task Force states that the CHPL has a “woefully deficient technology program.”
· CHPL’s Web site through the Town offers significantly less information than do Web sites of comparable libraries throughout the state.
· CHPL’s current positioning in the new technology is and will continue to be dependent on the statewide services explored and implemented by the State Library (e.g. NC LIVE and NetLibrary).
The Chapel Hill Public Library’s short-term needs include additional network bandwidth, a full-time on-site technology coordinator, and a dynamic Web site; its long-term needs include a training room and subscriptions to a variety of electronic publications and databases.
Computer and networking technology is having a marked effect on libraries. Initially, library computers connected to a local network were used to develop electronic cataloging procedures. Then, through the use of modems, people were able to access that catalog to browse for books. Now with the pervasiveness of the Internet and the attachment of high-speed servers with large storage capacity, entire books—as well as other media such as pictures, films and music—are available on-line. In addition to wired networks, wireless transmission now is being implemented that will provide even easier access to library information. As a result, people are now beginning to access information—especially technical information—using the Internet rather than by personally visiting the library. As a result, libraries are beginning to see a decline in demand for technical material. For the next few years at least, people probably will prefer to borrow novels and children’s books from the library, but how should the library plan for the future? The question is “Will libraries survive?” (For an article discussing this matter, see Appendix I.)
Let us now consider the status of the Chapel Hill Public Library (hereafter, the “Library”).
· In the Library facility there are 13 public PCs for Internet access, but according to recent guidelines[1], there should be 17 public Internet PCs to have one per 2500 population. Printers also are available. The Library has applied for a foundation grant that would make funds available for four more public Internet PCs and a server.
· The Library provides authentication to its patrons so they can remotely access the NC LIVE on-line database, which offers on-line access to complete articles from over 5500 newspapers, journals, and magazines; two encyclopedias; and indexing for over 10,000 periodical titles. A component of NC LIVE is to develop a contract that would provide approximately 4000 electronic books on-line.
· An automated telephone notification system is used to transmit overdue notices to patrons.
· Twelve staff members have PCs that can access the Internet through the Town’s network, use electronic mail, and print. The Library is licensed for 56 users to access the Innovative Interfaces system simultaneously. Although some of the staff members now use PCs that are “hardwired” to the local Library system through the serial port, their PCs act only as “smart” terminals. But the Library administration wants all of staff members’ workstations to function as true PCs. That would mean that staff members could access the Internet and the Innovative Interfaces system using the same machine. This would allow book lookup as well as reference information through the same device. The cost is currently prohibitive, but the Library hopes to have it as soon as possible. Another possibility for an integrated catalog that has Web access is for the Library to begin putting citations within the catalog itself so that users can click on a “hot-link” subject heading that will take the user to further information on the Internet about the subject. Rather than each library providing these linkages, eventually a commercial entity will provide the linkage, but it will be customizable by the individual library. It would be best if all staff and public accesses to the automated catalog and to the Internet could be made from the same workstation.
· The Library Director regularly communicates by e-mail with Town employees of other departments to provide Town, county, and regional information.
2.2 Network Information
The Library is one of the Town’s departments that received an initial network connection. The network setup can be described in three ways: basic, public, and planned.
2.2.1 The BASIC setup that has been in place for the past three years is a 64 Kbps Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) connection to Town Hall. The Library Director and Office Manager were provided a network connection to the Town system and to the Internet.
There were—and are—some problems with this system. Initially the connection was not consistently available. Category 5 wiring, which is better shielded for higher-speed transmission, was not installed in the Library, so additional staff could not be added easily. Speed was—and still is—too slow to handle much more than e-mail and small file transfer.
2.2.2 The original PUBLIC setup was implemented about 18 months ago, when the Library installed five public PCs with 56 Kbps modem dial-up access to the State Library system. This worked fine for a while because the State Library subsidized the Internet connection cost, leaving the Town with only the cost of five local phone connections. However, the State changed the rules on the phone connection and at the same time offered grants to support a network-managed approach. As a result, the Library ordered a server and installed Category 5 wiring to the public stations (and to the Library staff locations). Eight additional public PCs then were added to bring the total to 13, whereas the near-term goal is 17.
The current PUBLIC setup has been in place since early 2000. It has the same 64 Kbps ISDN network connection to Town Hall plus a 64 Kbps frame-relay connection to the State’s Information Technology Services (ITS) center. The network is segmented into a public side with the public PCs connected directly to the ITS network/Internet connection and a Town segment with a connection to the Town network as before. A network server equipped with proxy server software provides file, print, and mail services for Library staff, as well as an Internet connection to ITS. This allows Library staff to access Town services using the Town ISDN and Internet services using the ITS connection, thus providing better throughput for each service.
2.2.3 The PLANNED setup is described below in Sections 4 and 5.
3 ISSUES
From a technology perspective, the most challenging issue facing the Library is how to transition efficiently from an off-line printed book service to an operation that includes an increasing number of on-line electronic services. The primary impediment facing the Library—and the Town—is an insufficient number of technology personnel. As a result, implementation of network infrastructure enhancements has not been completed that would allow patrons to access the Library's Web-based catalog. Furthermore, the Library does not have a person fully dedicated to technology implementation, management, and training. Such a person is key to the development of an enhanced Web site, to the provision of patron access to online library databases, and to the training of reference librarians concerning on-line sources of information.
As stated in the Library Needs Assessment Task Force Report [2], the Chapel Hill Public Library has “a woefully deficient technology program.” This section describes things that need to be done to correct this situation during the next two years.
So patrons can optimally access the Library’s information resources from remote locations, a faster Internet connection is needed. As an interim solution, the Town plans to install Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL) service during the fall of 2000. This will increase network transmission speed between Town Hall and the Library from 64 Kbps to 384 Kbps.
To expedite the implementation of on-line systems, the Library needs an in-house technology coordinator. This person might be an existing employee whose duties are re-assigned or a new employee. This position would be responsible for Web-site management, library automation issues, public access Internet issues, training staff, managing the telephone system, and representing the Library on Town and State Library technology committees.
A dynamic Web site is needed with links to other useful sites. Well-developed Library sites from which to model include the following.
· Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County: http://www.plcmc.lib.nc.us
· High Point Public Library: http://www.hipopl.org
· Rowan County Public Library: http://www.lib.co.rowan.nc.us
A New England library has developed guidelines (http://www.capecod.net/epl/guidelines.html) for a standard format of what is necessary on a library’s Web site.
The Library’s Web site should be accessible from the Town’s Web site and vice versa. With appropriate links, citizens could more easily obtain needed information, e.g. homework sites, children’s information sites, government document sites, and genealogy sites. An outside organization should be hired to do the basic work on the Web site, but then train Library staff to maintain it.
Minimally the Web site should include:
1) Information to assist citizens
2) Access to all public libraries in NC that have Web sites
3) A list of current programs at the Library for children and adults
4) A catalog of recommended best Web sites with links to:
a) Children’s sites: The sites for young people should include links to sites that “teach” children how to optimally use the computer. The Library has some vision for this, but no current implementation. If the foundation grant (see Section 2.1) is obtained, it will allow two or three additional PCs in the juvenile area, and these PCs will be loaded with software for children.
b) Homework sites: To plan and maintain this information, Library personnel should establish a partnership with local high school Media Center personnel. Conversely, to enhance communication and planning, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School Board should appoint a representative to the Library's Board.
c) Recommended book lists
d) Sites of literary interest
e) Historical, genealogical, and archival sites
f) Government document sites
5) NC LIVE, which currently offers on-line access to complete articles from over 5,500 newspapers, journals, and magazines; two encyclopedias; and indexing for over 10,000 periodical titles. The Library can serve as a gateway to NC LIVE, but patron authentication is required. Although the Library provides this authentication to its patrons, the process needs to be automated.
NC LIVE serves not only public libraries, but also community college and university libraries. Therefore, some of the resources available are too powerful and complicated for public libraries. Thus there is a need to extract onto the Library’s Web site those databases that would be most useful to patrons.
6) Other on-line databases in addition to NC LIVE
7) Access to on-line reference materials
8) A map of the Library
9) A link to the Library’s collection (see next section)
The goal is to have a basic Web site implemented this fall.
A telnet interface to the Library’s catalog is functional, but a Web interface is not. The plan is to have internal Ethernet access to the Web-based catalog by the end of the year. This requires changes to the Town’s network firewall and an increase in network speed to 384 Kbps. Then the Library can make the Web-based catalog available for remote access by the general public.
The Library purchased software to allow Web site development and “point-and-click” access to on-line information, but Innovative Interfaces still needs to complete the setup. The goal is that the Web interface to the catalog will be functional for public use this fall.
Work to connect additional Library staff PCs to the network is ongoing and should be completed by the end of the year. Although seven employees now have on-line PCs, there is a short-term need to get one supervisor’s PC connected to the network and a long-term need for two more general staff persons to have access to e-mail. As part of the Town’s three-year life-cycle replacement program, the Library will get new PCs this budget year.
To have one public Internet PC per 2500 population (as recommended, cf. Section 2.1), the Library will need to have 17 public Internet PCs, but currently has only 13. Some of these PCs are used for “patron-assisted” searches, so they are at the desks of staff. If later this fall the Library receives the foundation grant funding (see Section 2.1), it will have money for four more public Internet PCs and a server.
4.7.1 There is a need for an automated system for meeting-room booking as part of the Library’s Web site. At present one person in the Library must be on call at all times to handle requests for meeting-room booking. If such software were implemented, it would free this person to do other useful work.
4.7.2 The Library must consider electronic books—complete books that are available on-line, e.g. NC LIVE. A question yet to be resolved is how the Library will pay for access to these electronic publications. In the future libraries may provide both a free basic service and a fee-based add-on service.
4.7.3 Library staff need time to investigate on-line reference services. They should be reviewing for purchase on-line databases not included in NC LIVE.
4.8.1 The Library needs to plan for the lending of materials in electronic book format. NetLibrary provides access to reference books in electronic format, and by using this service, the State Library hopes public libraries will better understand the issues associated with providing electronic books. This should help develop usage policies.
4.8.2 The Library needs to plan for and acquire reference materials on compact disk (CD). These disks would be available in the reference area with reference desk personnel available to assist patrons in using them. The Library needs to develop an efficient way off facilitating patron access to these resources, e.g. using a CD tower and allowing remote access. Conversely, rather than an in-house CD tower, the Library could consider a contract to make the same information available from an outside vendor. Allowing patrons remote access to this resource might cost more, but it would reduce demand on the Library’s facilities, e.g. building space, equipment, and parking.
4.8.3 To meet individual preferences, the Library may need to provide different types of computer display units. Some units may be on the wall, others may be recessed into tables, and yet others may be of laptop or palm size for use throughout the Library—in the meeting room and reference areas, for example.
The Library has auditory and large-print software to make the Internet accessible to blind and handicapped individuals. This screen enlarging software and a “talking” browser will be implemented this fall.
4.8.4 In the juvenile section of the Library there should be better access to on-line resources. Currently there is only one PC in the juvenile area. A CD tower connected to the in-house Ethernet network also may be justified to serve the children’s learning stations.
4.9 Other Issues
The Library is shifting from print format to electronic format for appropriate materials, especially reference materials. However, there is an increasing need for reference librarians to help users sort through on-line sites and resources to eliminate those sites that are inaccurate, flaky, or trivial.
Later, the Library needs to consider the following items.
As the number of patrons remotely accessing the Library’s Web site increases, it will be necessary to increase the external network speed to over 1 Mbps.
The Library needs a properly equipped room where people can be trained. This room could be used to train employees about new technology. Also, groups or businesses could use the room for training. In the latter case a fee might be charged for use of the room.
To properly equip the room, 20 laptop computers should be purchased and, for ease of use, the room should be equipped with a wireless network.
To reduce personnel time in booking this room, an automated system linked through the Library’s Web site should be implemented so requestors can book the room themselves.
Books, journals and magazines increasingly will become available in on-line, electronic format. Instead of buying these items—or borrowing them from other libraries—the Library should buy or rent electronic copies of such materials for patron use. In doing so, the Library would save shelf space but would need to have adequate PCs for patron use—unless these resources were also made available remotely.
5.4 Remote Access to On-line Books and Databases
The Library might play more of an “information broker” role. For example, it might subscribe to a “library of electronic books” or a “series of electronic journals” that might be too expensive for an individual subscription. The Library then could enable patrons with proper authentication to access these sources, perhaps through the Library’s proxy server. Libraries already are authenticating patrons so they can access remote databases “through” the library or directly to the vendor without having to physically come to the library. To help pay for these specialized sources of information, the Library might institute its own debit card.
5.5 On-line Database Subscriptions
Besides electronic books and journals, the Library should supplement NC LIVE by purchasing subscriptions to other on-line databases. In this regard, the Library should establish an agreement with UNC-CH’s Library Administration so any Chapel Hill citizen or business that needs access to an on-line technical database can have it—perhaps for a fee. This might be especially true for technical journals. For less technical on-line databases, the Library would pay for access to the database and then up to a certain number of users at any given time could have access to that database. Where possible, upon proper authentication by the Library, patrons would be allowed remote access to the database from home or office. The Library should serve as a “director” to help patrons know where to access needed information—either physically in the Chapel Hill Library, at UNC-CH Libraries, or on-line. There should be a link on the Library’s Web site that will take an authenticated patron to UNC-CH’s on-line library resources. UNC-CH’s Library Administration is said to be receptive to this type of linkage and CHPL administrators plan to explore this matter further in the near future.
5.6 Reference Materials in Non-book Format
Libraries now have the choice of increased use of reference materials in non-book format. Many reference books now include a CD. Eventually it is anticipated that some of these CDs will eliminate hard copy altogether.
With increased use of on-line and non-book-format reference materials by patrons, the Library should increase the help it provides concerning these new forms of technology. This entails special training for reference librarians, and it means they need to develop new strategies for communicating this advice to patrons either through the Library’s Web site or by e-mail.
The Library must continue to look for ways it can use technology to free employees from routine daily and long-term operational work. One example already mentioned is an automated meeting-room scheduling system. Other examples are outsourcing professional cataloging, routine technology maintenance assistance, on-line reference service, and self- checkout system. Employees freed from such tasks then could help transition the Library toward the use of more technology while minimizing increased budgetary needs.
This document concerns how librarians plan for technology now and implement it in the future. However, during this transition, people will expect the librarians to continue to provide up-to-date printed material. To bring about technological transition while still providing optimal service will strain existing personnel and budget.
With regard to personnel, the Library needs an on-site technology coordinator to manage all aspects of Library technology. Also, the Town needs a network specialist in the Information Technology Group to expedite implementation of upgrades to the Library’s network.
With regard to budget, the Library needs money to fund the training of staff to maximize the use of existing technological tools and to plan and implement future services. The Chapel Hill Public Library would not be in the position it is now without the help of the State Library. Without the guidance and leadership of the State Library—helping libraries get PCs, providing Internet access, providing training, helping get grants—the CHPL would just be getting started. Instead, libraries are now providing a basic service. The State Library is leading libraries statewide into the era of electronic books. It is providing the on-line database subscription service, NC LIVE. This State aid has been vitally important to the Chapel Hill Library!
To implement this plan, funds will be needed for a higher-speed network, for maintenance of a Web site, for subscriptions to various forms of electronic media, for acquisition of new technology, and for people to oversee and help with this technology. These funds can be obtained in a combination of ways. First, the Library must do its part by reallocating some of its funds away from the purchase of printed materials and into licenses to access new forms of electronic information. Second, the Library must retrain and reassign existing personnel to new technological functions even though some existing Library functions may be less well supported during the transition. Third, the Library Administration must even more aggressively pursue its efforts to apply for additional grants to aid the transition and support the new activities. Finally, Town Council must support the Library in its efforts by increasing the Library’s budgeted allocation in proportion to the Library’s success in the above efforts.
E. GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM
· GIS will be an important decision support tool for town offices and the Town Council in monitoring and evaluating development and in delivering town services.
· Network improvements should provide GIS to all town staff on the intranet to identify locations, facilities and parcels. The Town can develop its own GIS Internet site or link to the Orange County site.
· The Town should hire a programmer/analyst who can provide an assessment of office GIS needs, understanding of GIS by department heads and supervisors, and special or complex applications to a number of different offices. Basic GIS applications, including citizen access to town locations, can be obtained from Orange County free of charge.
· GIS performance standards should be considered in the purchase of departmental hardware. Creating and using GIS data/images require adequate disk and memory resources on computer workstations.
2 BACKGROUND
2.1 History
The Town’s geographic information system (GIS) is centered in the Town’s Engineering Department. GIS began in 1986 with the decision by Orange County to receive new property maps from its vendor in a digital format rather than in hard copy. Beginning in 1989 GIS software was evaluated by a committee composed of County staff and representatives from the Town, Carrboro, Hillsborough, the Orange Water & Sewer Authority (OWASA), and UNC-CH. In 1991, the Orange County Board of Commissioners approved a contract with Environmental Services Research Institute (ESRI) of Redlands, California, to obtain ARC/INFO, the world’s leading GIS software.
In 1991 the Town obtained a Sun workstation for its Engineering Office, a pen plotter, and a digitizing tablet. To be compatible with the County, it also elected to use the ARC/INFO software. Since there was no dedicated GIS staff, work was initially carried out by one Engineering Department member as an additional duty. Contract employees, often current or recently graduated UNC-CH students, were hired to provide assistance. In 1996 a part-time position was created which turned full-time in 1997 with the creation of GIS Technician position.
At the beginning of 1998 the County contracted with Atlantic Technologies of Huntsville, Alabama, for a data conversion project. This is a multi-year project that is to provide new orthophotos of the entire county as well as planimetrics and topography. In 1999 the vendor was to complete the Chapel Hill – Carrboro area and then proceed to the County area that is to be completed by November 1, 2000. Data problems with the topography have delayed progress of the project into the County’s area and the Town’s delivered topography will be adjusted to correct the vertical values.
The lack of GIS trained staff in other Town departments (except Planning) has led Engineering to provide GIS services for these departments. Maps are created and analyses performed by the GIS Technician on request.
The Police Department has basic GIS software installed on new laptops. Engineering does special projects for Police when needed. GIS is used for designing patrol districts, tracking crime/incidents by neighborhoods, special event planning (Halloween & NCAA), neighborhood projects, preparing and planning for emergencies, and environmental crime prevention (such as where to put a fence to keep people from using a specific area for illegal activity). Individual officers use maps on laptops from a GIS application provided by the County.
The Public Works Department does not now have in-house GIS capability. Within the last several years, Public Works employees have used GIS maps produced by the Engineering Department showing Town-maintained streets, Town-owned property, storm damage, leaf collection routes, snow removal, traffic signals, streetlights, and mosquito risk areas. Staff members attend the local GIS Users Group meetings and have had preliminary internal discussions on implementing a GIS network within the Public Works Department.
2.2 What Is GIS?
“A GIS is a kind of supermap, computer software that links geographic information (where things are) with descriptive information (what things are like). Unlike a flat paper map, where ‘what you see is what you get,’ a GIS can have many layers of information underneath its surface.” (Davis, GIS For Everyone, ESRI Press, 1999)
Many things are called “GIS” today, but since its beginning a true GIS was a system that performed spatial analysis with a relational database. Just displaying a map view of geographic features, let’s say of real property (cadastral), is computer-automated mapping rather than GIS. But identifying and analyzing relationships among geographic features (topology) is GIS.
For an informed view of the future of GIS, read Appendix II.
2.3 Current GIS Capabilities
2.3.1 Offices that currently have GIS software
· Engineering
· Police
2.3.2 Currently Developed GIS Applications
· Parcel maintenance
· Public access
· Parcel/Location query
2.3.3 Current GIS Hardware
· Sun
· Dell
2.3.4 Current GIS Software
· Arc/Info (editing, map production)
· ArcView3 – versions 3.1 and 3.2 (query, map production)
· ArcExplorer (query)
2.3.5 Current GIS Map Coverages
· Street centerlines and maintenance
· Resource Conservation Districts
· Bus routes
· Bridges
· Hydrology
· Floodways
· Land use
· Fire and emergency response grids
· Fire hydrants
· Police districts
· Traffic signals
· Town facilities & properties
· New building footprints
· Parcel and building address assignments
· Parcels, with background and annotation
2.4 GIS Implementation In FY 00-01
2.4.1 Hardware. The Town’s GIS is currently in the process of migrating from the Sun Unix workstation to the Windows environment. During the migration phase, the Sun workstation will be set up as a data server, ultimately to be replaced with a Windows server. Hardware is currently available to exchange data via tape drive, CD, or network connection. Color plotting is done on a Hewlett-Packard 1050CM plotter.
2.4.2 Software. This includes ARC.IMS for Web site development and maintenance, and ArcExplorer for basic query.
2.4.3 Data Conversion. The Atlantic conversion project is to provide large-scale orthophotos at urban, suburban, and rural scales; highly detailed planimetric data in the urban scale area of southern Orange County (Chapel Hill, Carrboro); rural scale data in the remainder of the County; and urban scale topography in southern Orange and rural scale topography in the remainder of the County.
2.4.4 Staff Support. In the past year the GIS Technician has evolved from mostly generating maps to focusing on data maintenance. Building footprints and street centerlines are continually updated by importing CD drawing files. The Atlantic conversion project has intensified this effort. Maintaining the planimetric layers is requiring more staff time, and therefore is limiting the use of this position by other departments for their project requests.
· Provide desktop access to GIS map coverages and land data for all municipal offices using the intranet/Internet
· Hire programmer/analyst to assess departmental GIS needs, to develop or adapt existing applications for town use including intranet access, and to design and implement applications for law enforcement, public works, and planning
· Utilize GIS to enhance crime fighting. For example:
· Allow officers to enter reports in their cars and place appropriate dots on a GIS map to show incident locations
· Make crime maps available to citizens on the Town Web page
· Provide officers at the start of a shift a map of crimes/incidents – click on the location dot and get information about the call
· Provide crime analysis including location of crimes by time, day of week, etc., in relation to suspects’ residences
· Provide maps in cars for officers to refer to in responding to calls
· Make GIS easy for police officers to use
· Complete an implementation plan for Public Works with input from potential users within the department and assistance from other Town Staff in Engineering and Computer Systems
· Show other departments the type of information Engineering currently has and promote new uses of GIS. A new Windows server will be set up to provide this capability. Ultimately this application would be made available on the Internet via the Town’s Web site sometime within the next two years
· Update town imagery every four years in cooperation with Orange County
· Provide GIS hardware and software, including projection system, for Town Council meetings
6.1 Participation
Some town departments that could benefit greatly from GIS have little understanding of GIS capabilities and have not requested GIS resources in past or current budgets.
6.2 Networking
GIS is an intense user of networking capabilities. Networks move data among workstations, servers, plotters, and printers to view, create, update, or edit map coverages and to produce GIS products. These networks must be fast and reliable to make GIS efficient and to prevent the corruption of data or graphic files. An evaluation of the current network may need to be done to assess the potential impact of GIS data sharing across the Town with various offices, agencies and jurisdictions.
6.3 Internet
Bringing GIS to the Internet is a step proposed to extend the benefits of digital products to a wider range of users. It will allow citizens and land professionals to directly access maps and land data, taking pressure off Town facilities and equipment. Before that can happen, however, the Town will have to obtain appropriate hardware and software.
6.4 Resources
The development of GIS for use by town offices will be highly affected by the availability of funds and expertise. Funds will be necessary to purchase appropriate computers and devices, software licenses, data files and conversion services, and in some cases outside expertise. If demand is high for applications, additional staff may need to be acquired with programming expertise or existing staff may have to obtain advanced training and skills in programming. GIS implementation may require staff or consultants to plan and design strategies.
6.5 Consortium
GIS in the County has been developed in partnership among the County, towns, OWASA, and UNC-CH. Shared access and data can support the needs of each jurisdiction, and cooperation will bring a cost-effective sharing of resources.
6.6 Training
Staff training will be necessary for creating, maintaining, and using GIS data. Training continues to be the strongest factor limiting expanded use of GIS town-wide. The current GIS Technician in Engineering is nearing the point where she will be available only to maintain data. What limited time is available allows only for the “status quo” type of mapping and does not allow developing new capabilities. The development of the Town’s computer systems staff has offered much needed hardware support. Centralizing upkeep of the hardware, particularly on the server side, would be most helpful in making GIS more accessible.
Currently, Town staff manage records across a mixture of data platforms that includes digitally developed manuscripts, hand written forms, videotapes, audiotapes, and blueprints. At present there are no Town-wide standards regarding records retention, nor how documents should be produced, stored, and archived. Thousands of documents are produced each year.
Two major short-term initiatives have been identified for this important Town endeavor.
Initiative 1. Develop a Document Management Program for the processing, filing, and storage of all Town documents. Town staff, the CTC, and outside experts can assist in accomplishing this initiative.
Initiative 2. Determine how best to engage available resources (Town staff, the CTC, the Council, citizens, and other interested or vested partners] to implement the findings of the structured process identified in Initiative 1.
The Town of Chapel Hill must deal with a wide variety of documents from various departments across the spectrum of media including text, plans, pictures, video, recordings, and other formats. As with any typical municipal records management issue, the permanence of the information covers a wide spectrum. Fixed information (e.g. Council minutes, Board and police records) is often accessed on a regular basis. Ultimately it is archived and becomes a part of the historical record of the community’s official life. Other records are modifiable (e.g. land ownership, zoning, land use) and many of the prior versions may or may not have to be made available for use.
The following is an overview of the current departmental record responsibility and the classes of records generated in the community.
Department |
Record |
|
Clerk |
Council minutes |
|
Council agenda items |
|
|
official Town documents |
|
|
Engineering |
GIS data |
|
survey maps |
|
|
engineering drawings |
|
|
Finance |
financial records |
|
network storage architecture |
|
|
Fire |
fire safety records |
|
incident reports |
|
|
hazardous material records |
|
|
maintenance records |
|
|
Housing |
housing maintenance records |
|
Inspections |
inspections records |
|
Library |
library records |
|
Personnel |
personnel records |
|
Planning |
development files |
|
development applications in process |
|
|
Police |
criminal records |
|
on-line criminal records |
|
|
Public Works |
building records |
|
vehicle maintenance records |
|
|
Transportation |
vehicle maintenance records |
The Town is currently using digital workflow for most text documents, such as the Council Minutes and the Council Agenda. Documents are typically created in Microsoft Word, but are often saved in alternative formats for particular applications. Such formats include Rich Text Format (RTF) or Web format [HTML]. The Town has scanning equipment and software to convert documents to Adobe PDF format or image file format as appropriate.
Some planning and engineering documents, such as blueprints, are processed in paper form and microfilmed for archiving. Architectural and engineering firms submitting plans to the Town have indicated that drawings can be provided in digital file format. Currently, the Town has not established standards for managing such documents.
For the three major groups of documents (Clerk’s files, Planning documents, and Police records), there exists a significant amount of historical information:
Documents managed by the Clerk are organized in a variety of ways. The following lists the form and volume of the documents.
Type Amount
Town Minutes 1869-1925 Handwritten 1,648 pages
1925-1990 Typed or printed 16,517 pages
1990-2000 Digital file 100 MB
Agenda Materials 1974-1999 Microfilm 1,900 sheets
1997-2000 Digital file 120 MB
Resolution Books Typed 6,582 pages
Ordinance Books Typed 4,088 pages
Documents are organized in folders that are currently tracked by a tax ID number. The numbers are cross-referenced to County-provided PINs (property ID numbers will be used in the future). There are approximately 2400 project folders. These folders consist of either paper documents or microfilm; some folders require both to form a complete set for a particular project. For perspective, the County GIS system tracks roughly 14,000 individual properties.
The Planning Department maintains the following active and archived documents.
Type Amount
Microfilm 2000 sheets
Paper 250,000 pages
Blueprint 10,000 pages
Police
About ten years of criminal records are in paper form. A case number tracks records. These records are accessed through a 3x5 card file system that records basic information, such as Name, Address, and Case Number. The records contain handwritten forms that would have to be scanned to create an image file. Imaged files would require a manually constructed indexing system for electronic search capability. The volume is estimated at 200,000 pages.
These records have been copied to microfiche. The Department intends to discard the paper records as soon as it obtains a reader-printer to replace one that isn’t working.
Presently, there is no single repository for Town documents that will ensure their protection from natural disasters. There are also many duplicates of official documents. For example, the Town has no central repository for such important documents as contracts.
Historically, document retention has been an issue. While State statute requires some documents to be stored for set periods, the Town does not have a set of uniform retention standards. The matter of who sets retention policies also must be resolved.
Key points of coordination for records management of various types rest within several departments, as follows.
Clerk Records Retention and Disposition
Engineering GIS Data Coordination
Finance Network Storage Architecture
Digital File Processing Technology
Planning Development Records Management
Police Criminal Records Retention and Disposition
Vendor support for Town records management is provided in three key areas: network storage, document conversion, and document processing.
Issues include the volume of documents generated, the net growth in volume (velocity of increase), the frequency of updates, and the frequency of retrieval required.
The degree of openness of the documents also is very important, not only for the Town staff, but also for citizens and others who use the documents. Whereas many documents are open to public use, some may be restricted to a department or even an individual Town staff member. Such a range of requirements establishes a variety of expectations that any new system must be capable of satisfying.
As system conversion moves forward, the following records management issues arise.
· What storage and retrieval issues does the format of existing records pose?
· diskettes
· Where does the conversion start?
· Consider converting existing files to new format(s)?
· What do citizens want?
· Expectations of services via electronic format
· What are citizens willing to pay for either directly (fee for service) or through taxes?
· What do the Town Staff want?
· What will be the disposition of hand-written records?
· Books are fragile.
· Potential cost savings when conversion of records is complete
· Less paper
· Less staff time
· Where will records be stored?
· In a Town-designated repository
· In the proposed UNC-CH records repository (The Town has indicated an interest in obtaining space in such a facility.)
· How will other miscellaneous issues be dealt with?
Records management is an issue that all governmental units are currently facing as the digital age races ahead. The ultimate goal in the records management arena is to create a flexible system that can adapt as needs change and serve the Town staff, the Council, and citizens effectively. The following two short-term initiatives define a process and develop a budget to determine how best to move forward to create such a system. Once these tasks are accomplished, the CTC and Town staff can determine whether there is any advantage to hiring a consultant to assist with implementing long-term initiatives.
Initiative 1
Follow the steps outlined to assist in the development of a Document Management Program for the processing, filing, and storage of all Town documents. Town staff, the CTC, and some time from outside experts can assist in accomplishing this initiative. Possible tasking of these resources is noted in brackets.
Step 1 – Inventory documents, forms, and records in use [Staff]
Step 2 – Determine retention requirements [Staff]
Step 3 – Determine options for implementing digital processing [Staff]
Step 4 – Determine options for digital archiving (including conversion of existing records) [Staff]
Step 5 – Identify best overall digital processing process for each type of document [Staff & Outside Expert]
Step 6 – Identify best overall digital archiving process for each type of document [Staff & Outside Expert]
Step 7 - Evaluate commercial digital processing solutions [Staff & Outside Expert]
Step 8 – Determine overall solution and probable costs [Staff & CTC]
Step 9 – Submit recommendations to Town Manager and Council [Staff & CTC]
Determine how best to engage available resources (Town staff, the CTC, the Council, citizens, and other interested or vested partners) to implement the findings of the structured process identified in Initiative 1.
The long-term goal of records management is to create an accessible, integrated records management system for the client (Town staff, Council, or citizen) that provides the sought information in a timely, cost-effective manner. Such a system must also properly archive all appropriate documents.
Long-term initiatives might include:
1. A system that is Town-wide rather than department-specific
2. A system that adequately archives records
· Provides direct links to information stored by others on the same subject
3. A system that provides for the charting of citizen complaints that would improve the consistency and accuracy of organizational response to citizens. The system should:
· generate automatic letters, faxes, or e-mails to respond to complaints.
4. A system that provides direct links among agenda materials, Council minutes, and other repositories of Town documents
5. A system that accommodates the conversion of existing data on microfilm to a more usable format
6. A system, utilizing electronic formats, that provides privacy and confidentiality of transactions
7. A system that could accommodate electronic Council agenda materials (for example, through the use of laptops installed in the Council Chamber for use during meetings, or provided in some portable method for use at home or at Town Hall)
A sound philosophy regarding barriers should avoid the trap of Thoreau’s observation: “Men have become the tools of their tools.” The technology selected should fit the needs dictated by the records. Obviously, Federal and State statutory requirements must be met. These requirements are not static in nature, and will constantly be changing as we move forward in the digital age.
The public also has expectations (requirements) that may range from instant access to records to Web pages rich with information. One must also consider the needs of Town departments, for they too have ideas about how such systems must be established to serve them.
The cost to implement an adequate records management system is probably one of the single largest constraints on where the Town can move in the future. Other barriers might include future advances in technology, privacy/confidentiality issues, and staff time and expertise.
1 SUMMARY
· The current VHF/UHF radio communications system used by the Town has several problems:
· Different public service groups have difficulty communicating with each other.
· The system often fails.
· Obtaining parts to repair the system is becoming increasingly difficult.
· The State already is implementing a statewide 800-MHz mobile data communications system and is planning to implement a similar, but separate, voice system. The Town is participating in the mobile data communications system.
· Many cities and counties in North Carolina already have implemented their own 800-MHz trunking radio communications system. Appendix III presents an overview of trunking radio.
· A new countywide 800-MHz radio system for voice communication is needed. It must include at least the County's Central Operations Center, the Sheriff, Hillsborough Police and Fire, Carrboro Police and Fire, UNC-CH Police, OWASA, volunteer Fire departments and Chapel Hill Police, Fire, Transportation, and Public Works. Such a radio system would offer each of these agencies separately and together the following benefits:
· improved system access
· communications privacy
· user priority levels for system access
· more efficient utilization of frequency resources
· flexibility in assigning multiple talk-group levels
· enhanced dispatching capability
· a smooth migration path to future technologies
There are four departments in Chapel Hill Town government that use radio communication: Police, Fire, Transportation, and Public Works. This section describes each of their radio communications systems.
2.1 Fire Department
2.1.1 Current System. The Chapel Hill Fire Department currently has one repeated Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) radio system assigned to it by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Because this channel is repeated, it also has the capability to be used as a “talk-around” channel by switching the radios to a second channel that sends voice communication on the receiving frequency of the repeater. With this capability, fire crews can talk line-of-sight or unit-to-unit when operating in close proximity or they can operate on the main frequency and talk to the 911 Center in Hillsborough. Although it sounds as if there are two distinct channels, there is really only one channel. When operating on the “talk-around” channel, units still compete with the repeated channel to be heard. Therefore, when fire crews are working two fire scenes, they must monitor and wait for each other’s transmissions.
To comply with the Insurance Services Organization that determines insurance rates for residents and businesses in Chapel Hill, dispatches are simulcast over a Very-High Frequency (VHF) channel dedicated to the Carrboro Fire Department. The Town has an agreement with Carrboro to allow Chapel Hill Fire dispatches to be aired over Carrboro’s frequency. Because of this agreement, in the event the UHF channel is not available, all Chapel Hill Fire units can use the VHF channel.
2.1.2 Desired System. In contrast to the foregoing arrangement, a “trunking” radio communications system (described more fully in Appendix III) would afford numerous benefits:
· One radio system would allow communications to all agencies in Orange County.
· The Fire Department would have the ability to move fire operations to multiple channels, thus increasing fire-attack effectiveness and safety.
· Trunking radios have unique identifiers allowing recognition of the user even when no voice is transmitted. If a firefighter were trapped, the 911 dispatcher could identify by the radio's identifier who transmitted a call for help.
· Trunking systems can provide cellular phone connections from the radio. This would allow fire crews to transmit confidential information without having to use the publicly accessible two-way radio system.
2.2 Police Department
2.2.1 Current System. Under the current license, the Police Department operates a UHF radio system for three-channel operation with “talk-around” capabilities. The primary and secondary channels are dispatched through the Orange County Communications Center in Hillsborough that handles dispatch via the E911 system. The third channel utilizes a low-wattage repeater designed for limited geographic use in the central business district. The radio repeater system is extremely outdated, even using vacuum tubes. This latter system was popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, and when a technical problem arises, parts are extremely hard to locate. The Police Department now is down to two repeaters and the maintenance company’s technicians are scavenging parts from all over the country to keep it going. Appendix IV summarizes the condition of the current system.
Each police vehicle is equipped with a multi-channel, mounted radio (a “mobile”) for use on all area police frequencies. In addition, each police officer is issued a multi-channel, handheld portable radio that has the same channel assignments as do the mobiles, but the handheld units have only limited output. Because of this limited output, there are areas in Chapel Hill where adequate radio communication is not possible. Similarly, there are areas in Chapel Hill where the mobile units do not provide adequate communication.
The Police Department’s front desk also has a wired remote transceiver that currently is not utilized because it does not provide adequate communications. As a result, the desk officer now uses a portable handheld radio instead of the remote transceiver.
The radio system is used to direct police officers to areas in Chapel Hill where their help is needed. It also allows officers to communicate with dispatchers at the E911 center and with each other. Because of the potential sensitivity and high risk of their duties, the current radio system does not offer adequate security to assure officers’ safety.
The Police Department’s current radio repeater system may not last three more years. This radio repeater system is a 1970s’ era vacuum-tube type. Its repeaters originally transmitted at 75 watts of power, but now they transmit at only about 12 watts with a 90-decibel-gain antenna that aids transmission some. But when line loss and connection loss are considered, 12 watts is barely adequate for proper police service communication.
The Police Department’s radio network for communications between cars and to Orange County’s Central Communications is under constant repair. Officers often must switch to secondary frequencies or use another agency’s frequency until repairs are completed. The Police Department anticipates a need to replace all repeaters within next 18 months at cost of up to $30,000.
The Police Department’s primary frequency often fails. When this happens, the Police units must switch to a non-repeating frequency that limits their ability to communicate with “dead” areas in town, of which there are several, particularly in the northeast part of town. Switching to a nonrepeating frequency also ties up the frequency the Police department would go to if there were a major command operation. The antenna and repeaters are old and constantly in need of maintenance. Typically, when they fail, it takes up 8 hours to repair them. On average, the system fails about once a week!
2.2.2 Desired System. Whereas the mobile and handheld radios use modern technology, the repeater system is outdated and needs to be replaced. A radio communications system upgrade is needed for the following reasons, in order of decreasing priority:
1. For better communications between E911 dispatchers and officers.
2. To provide automatic identification (ANI) and location (GIS) of an officer for those times when voice communication is not possible.
3. To allow mobile data terminals to integrate with the voice communications system.
Ideally, an upgrade to an 800-MHz radio communications system with seven to ten channels would adequately cover the needs of the Town for many years to come. Implementation of an 800-MHz radio communications system would allow for automatic identification, geographic location, and mobile data terminal interconnect capabilities. Such a system could be in place about three years from the time at which it was decided to install it.
The mobile data terminal interface also would require a routing office allowing electronic data communications to a central computer system. This refers to the interface between the 800-MHz tower and the Criminal Justice Information Network (CJIN) computers that Division of Criminal Information (DCI) manages. The mobile data terminal in the field communicates over a radio modem to an 800-MHz tower. This tower repeats the signal, and broadcasts the information to other mobile data terminals. The tower also has associated with it a computer (sometimes called a Base Station Controller) that is attached to a standard phone line. When the tower receives a signal destined for the DCI (running a license check, for example) the request is then sent to the DCI over a standard phone line using a modem on the Base Station Controller. The DCI processes the request, sends the reply back over the phone line, and the Base Station Controller passes the reply back to the tower to be broadcast to the mobile data terminal.
Other area agencies that also might want to consider implementing an 800-MHz radio communication system include UNC-CH Police, Carrboro Police and Fire, and Orange County. Such a system would greatly enhance intra- and inter-agency radio communication.
The proposed 800-MHz radio system would enhance communication by placing two or three transmitters around town to eliminate areas where communication is not now possible or is marginal.
2.3 Transportation Department
2.3.1 Current System. The Transportation Department’s current radio system includes one base station unit and mobile radio units in 54 buses, 2 trolleys, and 2 maintenance service trucks. There also are about 30 hand-held portable radios in the department, about 5 of which are multi-channel and include frequencies for Chapel Hill Police and Fire, as well as Transportation and UNC-CH Police.
The radio system is used to monitor and direct the operation of the department’s fixed-route, demand-responsive, and special shuttles. The heaviest use is by the demand-responsive services for communication between the dispatcher assigning trips and drivers calling passengers’ pick-ups and drop-offs. Communication between mobile or handheld units is possible but is limited in range since these transmissions do not go through the repeater.
The radio system being used by the Transportation Department today has the same technology and the same capabilities as such systems did 25 years ago!
2.3.2 Desired System. In order of decreasing priority, the Transportation Department needs a radio system that provides:
1. Better communication between mobile and hand-held radios. Range is the issue.
2. Separation of fixed-route and demand-responsive usage.
3. Ability to integrate mobile data terminals into the demand-responsive system.
4. Integration of “panic alarms” to summon assistance.
2.4 Public Works Department
The Public Works radio system is an administrative communications network. The primary mission of the network is support of the day-to-day operations of the Department.
2.4.1 Population Served. The radio system is used to communicate with Public Works field forces in the following divisions.
· Solid Waste Management
· Streets
· Right-of-way/Drainage
· Traffic Signals
· Construction
· Landscape
· Buildings Maintenance
· Fleet Maintenance
In addition to these primary users, the following Town departments have been added to the network over time to support their administrative radio communication needs.
· Housing Maintenance Division
· Orange County Recycling
· Inspections Department (recently moved to Nextel Cellular radiotelephones)
· Engineering Department (recently moved to Nextel Cellular radiotelephones)
· Parks and Recreation
During emergencies, Police and Fire can communicate on the Public Works network.
2.4.2 Technical Aspects. The Public Works network is a repeater system operating on two VHF channels, one transmitting and one receiving. The repeater is located on the top of Nunn Mountain near the OWASA water tower.
In addition to the repeater, the system has about ten direct-current, remote base stations located in the administrative offices of various departments. These direct-current remotes are hard-wired to the repeater over leased telephone lines. In the past, for administrative offices to communicate with field forces around town, it was necessary for the offices to be connected to the transmitter on Nunn Mountain via this system of direct-current remotes connected by a “closed loop” telephone circuit (hard wired). The direct-current, remote base stations date back to a time before Public Works had the current repeater system. They really are obsolete; they could, and probably should, be replaced with hand-held radio units.
The Public Works network repeater system has been in place in its current configuration for over 20 years. The repeater was replaced in 1999, at which time Public Works upgraded from an old analog, medium-duty repeater to a new digital, continuous-duty repeater. This enhanced the department's ability to communicate during high-traffic events such as weather emergencies. The new digital system supports about 200 radios, 50% mounted in vehicles and 50% hand-held.
3 ISSUES
3.1 Fire Department
· Orange County's 911 center would need to upgrade their consoles to dispatch on the new frequency. This is not a “plug and play” remedy but rather a full-blown capital expenditure. Therefore, the County would have to be involved.
· The cost would most likely be prohibitive on a Town-only basis because of the need for multiple repeater sites that would have to be added. In addition, there would be other costs associated with such a conversion.
· If the Town-only approach were used, the cost of maintenance on the system would be substantial.
An alternative that was once proposed was a cooperative effort with UNC-CH and their dispatch center. With this approach, a number of problems would need to be addressed. Therefore, the only viable approach is a countywide, multi-agency approach that would support the cost and that would prove valuable in times of disaster or widespread events. It must be remembered that one reason to move to a trunking system is to afford all agencies that work cooperatively in times of emergency or disaster one system on which to communicate. Moving only the Town to an 800-MHz radio system would almost be no better than the current system.
3.2 Police Department
If an 800-MHz radio communications system were implemented just for Chapel Hill, this would reduce the Police Department's ability to communicate with personnel of other departments and organizations, which is important. For example, if the Town went to an 800-MHz radio system while other County police units did not, then Town Police would need two radio systems to allow them to communicate with UNC-CH Police, Carrboro Police, Hillsborough Police, and the Sheriff. Another issue is that the 911 Central Communications in Hillsborough might not be able to have two systems – 800 MHz for Chapel Hill and UHF for the rest of the county.
The Police Department concurs with the Fire Department's assessment that a single, multiple-channel, 800-MHz trunking radio communication system is needed. This system could serve all Town departments that need to use radio communication and, if adopted countywide, would connect all emergency service agencies in Orange County. This capability would facilitate effective management of catastrophic incidents that cross over jurisdictional boundaries. Durham has mostly positive experience with its 800-MHz trunking radio communication system.
3.3 Public Works Department
3.3.1 Traffic Volume. During periods of high traffic volume Public Works sometimes experiences periods with excessive wait times and/or conflicting simultaneous transmissions. Public Works believes that they need a second frequency, particularly during emergencies, to separate routine and emergency traffic.
3.3.2 Repeater Facility. The repeater is currently located in a modular metal building on Nunn Mountain. The building is small and tends to overheat in the summer, despite the installation several years ago of a window air conditioning unit. A larger climate-controlled facility would improve the department's operational reliability and the life expectancy of the equipment.
3.3.3 Back-up Power. A liquid-propane-gas powered stand-by generator currently provides back-up power. Although this unit has been fairly reliable in the past, it is aging and should be replaced in the near future.
3.3.4 Technical Advances. The move toward an 800-MHz trunking system has few advantages for the Public Works network. During an emergency the department tends to route its traffic through command centers and operations centers. Public Works does not envision that these command and control protocols will change with the advent of the 800-MHz trunking technology. It is more important to make sure that the department’s existing equipment is kept in a good state of repair.
4 SHORT-TERM INITIATIVES
· As necessary, communicate with the State Highway Patrol’s Communications Engineer to discuss their plans and the possibility of using their 800-MHz transmission system. (An initial contact has been made. See Appendix V for more detail.)
· Communicate with local State legislators (Senators Kinnaird and Lee, Representatives Hackney and Insko) concerning the need for the 800-MHz radio system.
· Request that Motorola prepare a brief overview of the countywide requirements for an 800-MHz radio communications system. Motorola has indicated a willingness to provide this overview at no cost to the Town if the Town supplies maps and other necessary information, e.g. number of radios required for each department.
· Determine from the State Highway patrol, or from Motorola, the cost of renting radios for use with a State-provided broadcast tower system.
· Apply to the FCC for a second Public Works radio frequency.
· The Town Manager should communicate with the following organizations to determine whether they are interested in joint planning for a countywide 800-MHz radio system: Orange County's E911 Central Operations Center, Orange County Sheriff, Hillsborough Police and Fire, Carrboro Police and Fire, UNC-CH Police, OWASA, Orange County volunteer Fire units.
· Negotiate with OWASA to house the Public Works repeater inside their Nunn Mountain facility and attach it to their back-up power supply.
· Visit Fayetteville to see their 800-MHz radio system and talk with their Radio Communications Committee.
· Clarify the feasibility of a UHF linkage from the 911 Dispatch Center to an 800-MHz base unit for the Town.
· Continue to actively plan for the implementation of an 800-MHz trunking radio communications system. If they are willing, form a working subcommittee of the Citizens’ Technology Committee that will include the following countywide agencies in the planning process to implement an 800-MHz radio system:
· Orange County Emergency Dispatch Center
· Sheriff's Department
· UNC-CH Police
· Volunteer Fire
· Carrboro Police and Fire
· Hillsborough Police and Fire
· OWASA
· Develop a plan for phasing out the Town’s UHF radio system and phasing in the 800-MHz radio system – initially in the police and fire departments.
· Obtain a formal quotation either from the State or from Motorola to provide 800-MHz radio service to the Town as part of a countywide system. If the State does not provide the broadcast tower service, ask Motorola to quote a lease/purchase option to the Town.
· Issue, not later than 1 July 2002, a contract for implementation of an 800-MHz system.
5 LONG-TERM INITIATIVES
· Establish a Committee to oversee the implementation and management of an 800-MHz radio system. All organizations participating in the system should be represented on the Committee, together with representatives from the radio vendor and the telephone companies.
· During year 2003 or 2004 convert the Police and Fire Departments to an 800-MHz radio system.
· During year 2005 convert all other Town departments that require radio communications to an 800-MHz radio system.
6 BARRIERS
· The primary barrier to implementation of an 800-MHz radio system is cost, both for installation and for maintenance. However, use of the State’s 800-MHz voice transmission towers or lease/purchase financing should make implementation feasible.
· The other barrier is getting countywide cooperation to implement an 800-MHz voice trunking system. The fact that the State is moving to implement a statewide 800-MHz radio system should expedite this aspect of the project.
· To initiate the planning and development process necessary to implement the technology plans, the Town needs a cross-department planning team and budgeting process.
· To emphasize its central role in assisting all departments with their technology development, the Information Technology Group should be removed from the Finance Department and report to Town management.
· To provide better support, the Information Technology Group needs additional positions to meet the following needs:
· Helpdesk and training
· Network and server technology support
· Programming for Web-based services
· Clerical support for standard clerical tasks such as purchasing and answering phones
· Communications technology support for telephones, cellular telephones, pagers, two-way radios, and mobile data terminals.
· To provide budgetary accountability, the Technology Group should function as a cost center and charge user departments for services using similar procedures currently used for desktop computer acquisitions. Funds currently budgeted for technology initiatives in the departments should be considered for inclusion in the Technology Group cost center. Additional funds will be needed for technologies not currently included in the Town budget in any department.
· To expedite system changes and contain cost, the Information Technology Group should contract with outside vendors for new services. In-house personnel should maintain new systems after they are functional. The contracted vendors should be required to provide documentation and training.
About five years ago the Town's Finance Department hired an Information Technology professional to manage a Town local area network. Since that time the network has expanded from about 50 computers to about 250 computers, 25 servers, a local area network with a speed up to 100 Mbps, and a wide area network connection with a speed of 384 Kbps. To support this increased technology, the Town has hired two additional Information Technology personnel.
Town personnel, citizens, businesses and others rely on access to information contained on servers, both internal and external. The Town’s Technology Group is made up of three staffers who work primarily with network design and implementation, web maintenance, and user support. Successful implementation of electronic government systems requires Town-wide standards for storage and retrieval of information. In addition, these systems will require Web-enabled interfaces. As a result the Town needs cross-department technology planning.
· For optimal implementation of electronic government systems, the Town needs to standardize its technology planning across departments.
· Funds for additional cross-departmental projects need to be made available to the Information Technology Group, e.g. for servers and network system components and for development of an interactive Web page.
·
According to the North Carolina Public Library Director’s Association
guidelines[3], there should be
at least one full-time computer technician for every 50 computer-based workstations,
servers, printers, and related peripherals. Therefore, since the Town now has
over 300 computers, servers, and printers, it should have at least six Information
Technology support personnel, whereas it has only three. At a minimum there
is a need for one person to provide helpdesk services and training, another
person to oversee network technology and servers, and a third person to work
on Web-based services.
· With increasing use of wireless technology and the merging of telephone and data transmission technologies, the Information Technology Group should be responsible for technology planning and coordination for telephones, cellular telephones, pagers, two-way radios, and mobile data terminals. The Technology Group needs a staff member to oversee these aspects of communications technology.
· Because of workload or lack of training, some projects are being delayed. An example is the implementation of an enhanced, interactive Web site for the Town and for the Library. These Web sites are the foundation of electronic government services.
· To enhance short-term initiatives, the Town needs to establish long-range technology goals.
· To initiate the planning and development process necessary to implement technology plans, the Town needs a cross-department technology planning team. To develop a comprehensive plan, the team must balance objectives, budget and priorities. Representation from each department is essential. Close coordination with the Town Manager and the Finance Director will be needed to ensure an effective planning process.
· To emphasize its central role in assisting all departments with their technology development, the Information Technology Group should report to Town management. We recommend the following organizational structure:
Town Manager
|
|--- Information Technology
____________|_________________
| | | |
Dept A Dept B Dept C Dept D
These changes would better emphasize the cross-departmental position of the Information Technology Group within the Town's overall organization.
· To maximize time for technical matters, the Information Technology Manager should be provided with clerical support for standard tasks such as purchasing and answering phones.
· To provide better support, the Information Technology Group needs additional technical positions to meet the following needs:
· Helpdesk and training
·
Network and server support
· Programming for Web-based services
·
To provide funding for cross-departmental projects, the Town should
implement a budget process similar to that used for capital building projects.
The Technology Group would be responsible for coordinating technology funding
within and between departments. The costs for the Technology Group personnel,
software, and equipment including those listed below should be charged back
to user departments as is done currently for desktop computers:
· Software acquisition
· Web-site development
· Server and network acquisition and support
· Telephone, pager, two-way radio, and mobile data terminal acquisition and support.
· The Information Technology Group should contract with outside vendors for new system implementations. Vendors should be required to provide thorough documentation and in-house training so staff can maintain each new system. Staff should consider the State’s Information Technology Services as one vendor source.
· The Information Technology Group should continue to maintain the Town’s Web site and to develop additional electronic government systems.
· Working with the Town Manager and Departmental Managers, the Information Technology Group should establish written long-range technology goals.
· The Technology Group together with management and the cross-department technology planning representatives should establish a multi-year funding plan for technology.
· The Information Technology Group should update and make available written guidelines for Town technology equipment and software.
· The Information Technology Group should continue to maintain the Town's Web site. To continue to implement additional electronic government systems, the Information Technology Group should be authorized to hire a programmer to work on Web-based services.
· As the Town continues to move in the direction of electronic government, the resources of the Information Technology Group should be strengthened in parallel. Wherever possible, the services of outside vendors should be contracted to expedite change and contain cost. In some cases the Town should re-assign and re-train personnel, or hire new personnel, to provide necessary support.
· The implementation of additional wireless technology by the Town will place a growing demand on the communications section of the Information Technology Group, which will require a communications technology support person who will be responsible for telephones, cellular telephones, pagers, two-way radios, and mobile data terminals.
·
One barrier to removing the Technology function from the Finance
Department and adding new positions is the additional funding. The Town should
consider reassigning personnel to the Information Technology Group should that
prove more beneficial to the Town than maintaining the current staffing arrangements.
· Another barrier might be the “pooling” of funds for use by the Information Technology Group. Such “pooling” will result in better service to each department and an ultimate expenditure savings for the Town.
The period between 1850 and the First World War was the golden age of the American public Library. The number of public libraries went from around 50 in 1850, to 300 by 1875, to several thousand by the turn of the century. A lot of this growth was the direct result of Andrew Carnegie’s largess. But he was responding to a general conviction that libraries were essential institutions for social progress, to the point where he could say the public Library “outranks any other one thing that a community can do to help its people.” The Library movement battened on the late-nineteenth-century ideology that saw literacy both as crucial for social advancement and as ensuring an enlightened civic discourse.
The founders of the Library movement envisioned the public Library as an equal partner of the public school in achieving these goals. It was a time, after all, when schooling was more limited than it is today — in 1890 only a quarter of American students finished high school — and when the curriculum was mired in rote learning that had little relevance to the forms of literacy that reformers wanted to establish. The public Library, by contrast, seemed to offer a venue that was accessible to everyone, one that “appeals to and nurtures every idiosyncrasy,” as one enthusiast put it. And as the libraries went up, cadres of “apostles of culture” staffed them. Many of these people graduated from the newly established Library schools, the first of which was founded by Melvil Dewey (of Dewey decimal system fame) at Columbia University in 1887.
By any material standard, the American Library movement of the late nineteenth century was a remarkable success, which left the nation in possession of a public Library system that became a model for other nations. With its maturity, though, the public Library came to be increasingly taken for granted. It settled into a respectable but decidedly second-tier role as a community institution, staffed by well meaning but underpaid and largely female personnel — by 1920 around 90 percent of librarians were women, a higher proportion even than in teaching or social work.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the public Library’s role has been further circumscribed. Radio, movies, and TV made the Library less essential as a source of entertainment and information, and libraries have not tried hard to compete in this domain: their collections are still dominated by books. And more recently, book superstores have further eroded the Library’s importance among its natural constituency of the middle class. As disposable income grows, people find buying books to be an attractive alternative to borrowing them, particularly since the retailers are in a position to offer an unlimited selection of recent titles and a more congenial environment for browsing and socializing.
None of this means that people have ceased to patronize the Library: a recent survey funded by the Kellogg Foundation found that 68 percent of adults reported having gone to a public Library at least once in the previous year, and 38 percent reported going more than five times. But over the years the Library has clearly lost ground in the civic consciousness. States and municipalities pay lip service to the importance of libraries, but are apt to slight them in their budgets, and civic-minded people are increasingly likely now to make contributions to the local PBS station rather than to the Friends of the Library.
By all rights, the increasing availability of networked computers should diminish the public Library’s traditional role still further. A 1998 Commerce Department study found those 62 million people are using the Internet, and other estimates put the figure still higher. Most of these Internet users are drawn from the group that public libraries have traditionally served — they are younger than other adults, have higher incomes, and are comprised of a high proportion of white-collar knowledge workers (45 percent, against a national proportion of 27 percent). These are people who already use the public Library less often than their parents did for purposes of obtaining recreational and instructive reading. Now they no longer need to rely on the Library even for the sorts of information they can’t easily get on National Public Radio or at Barnes and Noble: a biographical article on Charles Babbage, the text of a bill, a map of Uruguay. They may still want to have a Library around as an information source of last resort, but they have a number of more convenient options to exhaust before they are driven to use it.
But unlike the other sources of information and entertainment that have emerged in the twentieth century, networked computers have drawn attention to the Library as at no time in the last hundred years. Behind this revival of interest is a new ideology of literacy, this one couched not in terms of the importance of books and reading but rather in terms of the more nebulous notion of “access to information.” On the one hand, computer literacy is regarded as essential to social mobility; hence the warnings that a failure to provide universal access to the technology will lead to the creation of an economic and social gulf between information “haves” and “have-nots.” At the same time, people argue that universal access to information is essential to robust civic debate. In the words of a recent report of the Benton Foundation, “the free flow of information to all who desire it, regardless of race, income, or other factors, is vital to the functioning of a free society.”
The National Science Foundation has sponsored the digital libraries’ initiative that provides for more than $25 million on the first round of funding for a range of projects. Major libraries like the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have initiated ambitious digital Library projects, as have the national libraries of Britain, France, and Germany. Corporations like IBM have made the “digital Library” a theme for new suites of applications. And the field of Library science has been reinventing itself in new or revamped programs, sometimes under new names calculated to cast off the traditional stereotypes of the Library profession.
There’s a certain amount of voguishness in all this, but no more than there was in the Library movement of the nineteenth century. The question is: When the current rush of enthusiasm has subsided, will we be left with an infrastructure and institutions as robust as those that emerged a century ago? And how much of a role will traditional libraries actually have to play in the informational new order?
The problem in talking about the future of the Library is that it isn’t always clear what people have in mind by the term. To many, the phrase “digital Library” conjures up the picture of ascension of the current Library into disembodied electronic form. No one goes so far as to predict the end of the traditional Library. At the least people reserve for it a role as an archive where we can preserve “legacy collections” of paper books and documents and as a safety net for the “information have-nots.” But as an institution it is conspicuously absent in most of the scenarios that visionaries paint. Newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals — all are coming on line, and it’s certain that electronic publication will soon become the chief means for disseminating scientific articles and information, given the high costs of print publication, the general availability of networked computers in the scientific community, and the importance of reducing publication lag time.
It’s not surprising, then, that people should take the eclipse of the traditional Library as not just inevitable but imminent, and that they should be disinclined to spend money to replace or expand current Library facilities — Why bother, when books will be obsolete any day now? The fact is, though, that it will be a long time before most Library collections are available on line, and there are still basic issues to be resolved before any large-scale conversion can proceed. For one thing, there are at present no general standards for scanning, storage, or document formats for all this digitized content — standards that it will be no small matter to agree on in the decentralized world of the Internet, particularly at an international level and in a rapidly changing technological context. Then too, it isn’t clear who will pay the costs of conversion. At current rates, it would cost around a billion dollars to digitize just the 17 million books in the Library of Congress, without taking into consideration the 95 million other documents in its collection or the hundreds of millions of books and documents from other collections that are not represented there. And there will be additional annual costs for storing and “refreshing” the collection to keep up with the deterioration and obsolescence of storage media. Unlike the costs of processing and storage, moreover, the costs of conversion will not be dramatically reduced in coming years, since the work is necessarily labor-intensive. So we can expect that the process of conversion will take a long time — indeed. It’s a certainty that hundreds of thousands of “brittle books” and other fragile documents in Library collections will completely decompose before anybody can get around to digitizing them.
Moreover, even when large portions of current Library collections are available on line, there will still be a need for books and for buildings and shelves to hold them. Granted, many of the current limitations of digital reading technology will be overcome in the near future: we’ll have cheap, lightweight, high-resolution displays that can operate for long periods at low power, and perhaps even commercial versions of the thin flexible displays that people have referred to as “digital paper.” But the features of the printed book that count as limitations for purposes of storage and distribution — the fact that each text requires a fixed material support — make it irreplaceable as a medium for the sustained reading of complex texts. We tend to forget how much the process of reading a book is dependent on the physical manipulation of the volume and the sense of place it produces.
It’s a safe bet, then, that the book will remain the primary form for reading the sorts of works which are at the center of cultural life, and which make up the core of public Library collections — works like novels, biographies, histories, or the more “readerly” periodicals. As collections come on line, of course, we’ll also have these works in a digital form that makes search and annotation easy, alongside of new works with multimedia, hypertext, and the rest that can only be accessed in digital form. And the books themselves may soon be produced and distributed in different ways, now that networked printers make it possible to make high-resolution bound copies at any location of any of the hundreds of thousands of texts that will soon be available on line.
Notwithstanding the vision of the disincarnated digital Library, then, it’s clear that local, brick-and-mortar libraries will have a continuing role to play, not just for the immediate present but for any period we can reasonably foresee. Indeed, the Library’s role as the repository of a persistent print culture is an important reason for asking it to be the chief agent in providing public access to digital information, rather than using arguably more convenient facilities like post offices, Internet cafes, or simply leased spaces in office buildings or shopping centers.
But there’s an even better reason for making libraries the mediators of public access to electronic information: in a word, librarians. When you listen to the visions of cyberspace painted by many people, you sometimes have the feeling of a place where a neutron bomb has gone off — of endless rows of “cyberstacks” where never a virtual footstep falls. But if there is one thing that distinguishes networked computers from print, it is how support-intensive they are at every turn. Not just because of the demands of machine and system maintenance, but because people need help in finding what they are looking for in the labyrinth of the Web - and often, in the absence of common document standards, in simply getting it to display on a screen. Anyone who works in an office or university setting is painfully aware of these difficulties, but the problems are even more pressing for Library patrons, who tend to be inexperienced users and who don’t have friends or colleagues handy on whom they can call.
Then there is the problem of filtering and evaluating content. In recent years, most people have concentrated on the out-and-out offensive sites — the pornography, racism, unfounded rumor, and rampant and sometimes unscrupulous commercialism. But even if we had filtering services and programs that could efficiently screen out the objectionable sites without ruling out inoffensive material, we would still have the challenge of helping users sort through millions of on-line sites and resources to weed out those that are merely inaccurate, flaky, or trivial.
Librarians want patrons to have help in sorting the good from the bad. The commercial index services can help here, and so can indexes compiled by various associations and professional groups. But the numerousness of the indexes and resource pages tends to undercut their usefulness: they can be as hard to find and evaluate as the sites they recommend. In the end, even sophisticated users wind up depending heavily on pointed advice on where to look for things. There is no substitute for a helpful librarian looking over one’s real or virtual shoulder!
Providing the level of user support that digitization calls for will require a considerable increase in Library budgets. A century ago, Carnegie made it a condition of his grants for building libraries that communities pledge to provide annual support of no less than 10 percent of the capital cost of the building. In the digital world, by contrast, costs of support and maintenance exceed capital costs by a factor of anything from 200 to 500 percent. This is a major preoccupation of business users, and perforce of companies like Microsoft, who are continually announcing initiatives aimed at reducing the “cost of ownership” of systems running their software.
It’s true that some of these costs will be lower for libraries and schools, who can get by with less powerful technology than corporations and who may be able to enlist community volunteers to help with installation and support. Some libraries will benefit, too, from the “e-rate” provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that require telecommunications providers to set aside funds to reduce access costs for under served users and institutions. However, this program was sharply scaled back in June 1998 in response to Republican complaints that it would increase long-distance telephone rates. But there is no getting around the increase in labor costs that digitization requires. This consideration is largely ignored in the various studies of the costs of wiring schools and libraries, all of which assume that actual system maintenance can be performed by a small, centralized staff while routine user support is provided by the existing staff of librarians or teachers, once they’ve had special training in the use of computers.
This is unrealistic, particularly when you take into account that user support for Library PCs is much more labor-intensive than it is in the office sector, since so many Library patrons require basic help using the technology. With strong community participation, the Library might be able to make up the shortfall without skimping on building maintenance, book acquisitions, or other programs. But digitization will be a heavy financial burden for libraries in most communities, not just in poor or remote areas but also in wealthy towns in the heart of booming high-tech regions. Without greatly increased levels of private and public support, it’s hard to see how most libraries will be able to cope with the support demands that “informatization” imposes.
In the last analysis, of course, the usefulness of a Library depends on the content it makes available. This was where the Carnegie libraries most often came up short. Despite repeated appeals, Carnegie refused to provide money for books for the libraries he endowed, arguing that this should be a local responsibility. In the end, selection and acquisition were left to the discretion of local authorities, who were highly uneven in the way they stocked their shelves. Many libraries were largely empty for years after their founding, and popular novels and other light reading dominated the collections of most others. H L. Mencken wrote in 1928: “Go to the nearest Carnegie Library and examine its catalog of books. The chances are five to one that you will find the place full of literary bilge and as bare of good books as a Boston bookshop.”
In principle, this is where we have an advantage over the last age of the Library: once a resource is developed by anyone, it can be available to everyone. Granted, there will be technological disparities between rich and poor here as well, since some schools and libraries will have much better access to content than others. And innovation will only increase the differences — unlike books, digital technology has to be constantly replaced to keep up with user expectations and the demands of increasingly bandwidth-intensive content like audio and video. But while all of this will have an effect on libraries that want to provide their patrons with access to video or software, as many do, the problem shouldn’t be too marked for most of the books and periodicals that are central to the Library’s traditional mission. The real disparities here will be in the money that libraries have available to obtain access to digital works and collections.
This, too, is a question that’s been largely neglected in the discussions of Library digitization. The general assumption seems to be that the obligation to give people “access to information” will be pretty much discharged once we have put the appropriate hardware and uplinks in place, with the creation of digital content left to the private sector and existing public institutions. In this regard the debates over the e-rate and access to information suffer from questionable parallels with the historical precedents for universal service, like postal service, rural electrification, and telephony, where people assumed that the mere fact of connectivity would be sufficient. As Berkeley’s former University Librarian, Peter Lyman, has observed, in most current models, “the Internet is defined as a broadcast medium in which the digital Library consists of universal access to a commercial digital marketplace in which the needs of citizens are fulfilled through their role as consumers. The public interest in learning will be served through subsidized network connections to public institutions like schools, museums, and public libraries.”
The question is whether libraries will be able to provide a range of content that justifies the enthusiasm for universal access. One issue, as we saw, is whether funds will be available to convert and develop the resources that libraries need. Another, no less pressing, is whether copyright law will allow libraries to create and use on-line resources. Under current copyright, most libraries do not have the option of translating any significant part of their important holdings into digital form, and if the new copyright term extension is passed, the amount of material they can translate will be enormously constrained for another few decades. And new copyright proposals that are making their way through Congress will sharply curtail the fair-use rights that libraries have traditionally relied on and hamper their ability to circulate digital materials to their patrons.
Even if resources are available and legally accessible, moreover, it isn’t clear how libraries will come up with the money to pay for access to them, particularly the books, journals, and periodicals that publishers have begun to put on line. At this point, it’s true, publishers are often chary about moving to on-line publication.
They are worried about uncontrolled copying of works, concerned that digital publication will affect the market for print versions of works, and uncertain about what kinds of payment models they ought to use and how they can make money from the process. Ultimately, though, none of these reservations is an insurmountable barrier to electronic publication. The copying of documents can be impeded by systems that are already available which control the use of documents, so that a Library would be able to display a work only on certain designated displays or print it only on secure printers. The concern that on-line publication will cannibalize the print market is also overdrawn, particularly for the kinds of books that are central to public Library collections — even if you give novels away on line, few people will want to read them that way. In fact, there is some evidence that on-line distribution can actually increase print sales, among other reasons because it gives prospective purchasers much more information about a book than they could have if they encounter it in a bookstore or catalogue. And secure payment models are already being developed in other areas of electronic commerce and should raise no special problems with regard to books.
The economics of this new world are complicated, and publishers have only begun to timorously address the problem. In theory, digital publications should be much less costly to libraries than print books and documents: publishers incur virtually no incremental expenses in providing public institutions with low-cost access to digital texts so long as they can maintain most of their for-pay market in the process. With digital publication, moreover, libraries are in a position to pool their resources to obtain works: a city or university Library system can buy a single site license to a magazine or journal that will be accessible from all its branches. (The aggregation works the other way, as well: some publishers have begun to offer Library subscribers a site license that gives them access to an entire list of journals.)
But for most types of publications, rights-holders have little current incentive to make works available to libraries, all the more because the Web creates new direct markets for material that previously had less commercial value, like newspaper archives. And even if libraries can get access to these materials at relatively low cost per document and have to pay only for documents that patrons actually use, the ultimate budget increase will be considerable, since so much more content is involved. For example, a local public Library that has 12,000 books on its shelves can now provide patrons with access to hundreds of thousands more publications. And access costs are likely to increase still more as the computer industry moves toward devaluing hardware and charging more for service, on the model of cellular telephone service.
To cover the costs of electronic access and higher levels of support, some libraries have already begun to charge for services. The British Library charges users for the right to access its on-line catalog and has recently proposed a £300 annual fee for anyone who wants to make more than nominal use of the collections. There may be a justification for asking users like large corporations to pay for some of the services they obtain from major public libraries. But the policy breaks with a long tradition of free public access, and many people fear that it will inevitably lead to a decline in service, as libraries devote more resources to revenue-producing programs. In any event, this approach is clearly not an option for libraries in small towns or poor communities, which have few corporate patrons. If fee-for-service becomes a standard practice, it will exacerbate the disparities in information access between rich and poor communities.
The alternative is a greatly expanded program of Library subsidies. These could be in the form of direct grants or through an extension of the notion of universal service to publishing and the production of content, where a portion of publication revenues or licensing fees is set aside to subsidize access for underserved schools and libraries. Or a similar effect could be achieved if we simply extend the notion of a depository Library, by encouraging or requiring publishers to provide a version of each digital publication to a national on-line collection that is accessible from public libraries and similar institutions. (The Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which is a true national depository in a sense that the Library of Congress is not, has already negotiated an agreement of this sort with the French union of publishers.)
The needs of support, the costs of access, the development of resources — all of these will increase the bill for reinvigorating the public Library system, over and above the substantial costs of wiring libraries in the first place. And we need an approach to digital copyright that balances the needs of libraries with those of content providers, who not surprisingly have been far more effective in shaping current legislation. If we truly believe that universal access is both a public good and a private right, though, we have to realize that the public interest in obtaining information won’t be satisfied simply by providing everyone with access to a computer and modem, no more than the public interest in reading books was satisfied once Carnegie had provided buildings to house them.
APPENDIX II. WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF GIS?
What is the future of GIS? According to the world leader of GIS, Jack Dangermond, President of the Town’s software company ESRI:
“It will continue to thrive; more so in the future than in the past. For thirty or so years, this field has grown about 15-20% per year, and it has resulted in a healthy GIS industry as well as an enormous user base of GIS professionals. During that time, GIS technology has evolved with users’ needs for spatial and geographic information in a variety of fields. With the development and maturing of standards, component architecture, and the Internet, I believe the technical platforms of GIS will allow us to extend the applications and reach of GIS into many fields.
The value of geographic information and the software tools that process this data will continue to have enormous impact. Spatial data and GIS are fundamental to the way people will conceive of computing in the future. The broad based interest of DBMS companies is evidence of this. This interest can also be seen in the telecommunication industry, where we are seeing the emergence of ‘Location Services’ (a kind of simple application of GIS technology and data). This application will be one of the next big innovations in consumer services. Similarly, the whole field of linking citizens to government using the Internet and CRM (customer resource management technology) is being constructed around spatial visualization and collaborative participation. Fields such as supply chain management and logistics are just beginning to see the advantages that GIS provides. Finally, I feel GIS will transform our citizen/government relationship and perhaps how democracy actually works.
GIS will have a long life and those people associated with it will continue doing important work. GIS professionals will build and maintain GIS and related data that will be at the heart of all of these emerging fields.”
This Appendix presents an overview of 800-MHz trunking radio communication systems, developed from notes taken at a presentation on 31 August 2000 by Dene Haugland, Motorola’s North Carolina 800-MHz Radio Communications representative. His telephone number is 919-598-4028.
In a standard, conventional public-safety radio communications system, if a Police Department has been assigned a UHF channel by the FCC, the department might have up to five channels that can be used. But different public safety groups communicate independently of each other, so you might have a VHF group that has difficulty talking to a UHF group.
The following section describes how an 800-MHz trunking radio communications system overcomes the above problem. The 800-MHz system is much different from the standard, conventional type of radio communications.
The 800-MHz trunking radio communications system has taken the telephone technique of trunking and applied it to radio communications. So it is basically a computerized radio system that works on a trunk network. Dependent on the size of the system required, normally there are at least five channels (i.e. transmitter/receiver units) per transmission tower. All of these five transmitter/receiver units reside on each tower and there is a central controller in the equipment room associated with that main tower. This central controller is basically a computer that is connected to each of the trunk radio transmitters. The controller will be out at a site somewhere — wherever the main tower is. Countywide would require a “simulcast” system where there are several towers and transmission would occur simultaneously from each of these towers to provide the required coverage. The way it works is that when the operator of a portable or mobile radio pushes the “talk” button, there is a control channel that is constantly sending an outbound signal and listening for an inbound signal. That lets the system know if a radio is asleep, turned on, out-of-range, etc. So whenever the “talk” button on a radio is pushed, a signal is transmitted to the control channel — whichever control channel is monitoring that day. The signal then goes to the central controller that identifies the radio unit and assigns it to one of the five repeaters on the tower. That is why you get more efficiency than you do in a standard radio communications system, where everyone has to wait until some other person gets through talking. Instead, this system can assign a different channel to each “talk group”, as it becomes active.
The central controller is hardwired to each repeater (in the same equipment room) at the main tower site. You then link this controller back to the 911-dispatch center either by wire-line — regular telephone lines, fiber optic, T1 — or microwave. Microwave probably is more efficient than telephone. All of the control is at the dispatch center. For example, if a police car makes a call, the signal would go from the car to the repeater that is the control channel for that day. The repeater acting as the control channel is automatically rotated each day to prolong the repeaters’ lifetime. The control channel then sends the signal to the central controller, who identifies the calling unit and the talk group to which it is assigned. The central controller then assigns a repeater and in milliseconds sends out a signal that “opens” every radio on that talk group. Each tower normally communicates one-to-another by microwave. Thus a given radio call “keys up” all towers in the county simultaneously. The central controller is at the “main site” only and then you have other sites off of that, so there is only one central controller. The other sites have “intelligent repeaters.”
You generally design the system for about 100 radios per channel. Thus with a 5-channel system, you could go up to 500 radios with no problem of the system getting busy where all five of the repeaters were constantly talking at the same time.
Motorola command consoles are capable of “mix and matching.” Thus the Town of Chapel Hill could be on 800-MHz trunking but still be able to communicate with the Sheriff’s Department (say) that might be using UHF. You can actually patch a UHF radio to a trunk radio through the back of the console. This can be a manual or automatic patch. It is recommended that this not be done automatically, because it then might tie up a repeater to that patch all the time, which decreases efficiency. Such patching causes an irritating delay in transmission. The County is on UHF/VHF radios and they dispatch for Chapel Hill. Since this project should be approached on a countywide basis, we cannot implement a system that does not involve the 911 Center. However, we might want to examine the possibility of a linkage from an 800-MHz unit in Chapel Hill to a UHF unit at the dispatch center.
Each system has a SIMS terminal. Basically this is a management terminal to which a selected number of people have access. It is password-code protected. These people are the ones who can make changes to the talk group setup, etc. Some cities have as many as 3 or 4 of these SIMS terminals. The SIMS terminal also runs diagnostics on the system 24 hours a day.
Here are some of the capabilities of this type of trunking communications system. Just a standard 800-MHz system has about 48,000 different IDs. In other words, you can have 48,000 different radios deployed, and you can have something like 4000 different talk groups. Such groupings are called “talk groups” rather than “channels,” because you are not just sharing channels; you are also partitioning these channels into talk groups. So for most of the trunk systems that have been implemented, the police department (for example) might have 60 talk groups — that is like having 60 different channels. A department can establish these talk groups in whatever way it would like, e.g. tactical channels, call channels, event channels (just for a specific occasion), etc. All of this is programmable for each radio. You congregate into a given talk group just those people who need to talk to each other. The standard portable radio allows programming of up to 160 talk groups.
Because the system is “smart,” it has a lot of features. Basically you have a push-to-talk ID so that every time a radio “keys up,” it is IDed. Since this identifies the caller, it will stop any malicious use of the radio. The system has an “emergency call” feature where if a policeman is in trouble he presses the red button on top of the radio and it sends back an emergency alarm that has priority over the whole system — identifying who he is, etc. You can have “talk group merge” so if a disaster occurs, all the different talk groups can be merged at the console into one big talk group. You can have “storm plans” — what is called dynamic regrouping — where just a couple of key strokes in the dispatch office will bring certain people together out of different talk groups because they make up some type of relief team. There is call alert, like a paging feature. There is private call where you want to call just one person so that no one else can listen in. Transmission encryption also is available to provide private communication for additional protection during (say) a drug bust. Since there are so many different radios that have access to the system, there are different levels of priority; people with higher priority will get preferential transmission if busy signals start to occur. If a radio is lost or stolen, using the command console it can be deleted from the system. Most cities also have an emergency or call channel that every radio has in the same slot; for example, this is where Public Works can contact Police, etc.
Motorola now is producing digital systems and this is what Chapel Hill should consider. Currently Motorola also makes analog/digital systems. The NC Highway Patrol’s system is a digital system and it is the foundation of the statewide system. However, we cannot use the mobile and portable radios that we now have because those units are UHF conventional, not 800-MHz trunking. To convert to a trunking system we basically will have to do away entirely with our existing system. However, there is a market for these older systems. Some of the smaller towns are still UHF conventional. Other cities have donated their radio systems to various organizations to make it a tax write-off, e.g. to colleges like Durham Tech for use in their electronics classes. However, when the statewide system is implemented, more and more of the smaller towns probably will begin using the 800-MHz trunking system.
One of the best-managed Motorola 800-MHz trunking radio communication systems in North Carolina is at Fayetteville in Cumberland County. They have close to 3000 radios on a 16-channel system. This includes police, fire, transportation, public works, animal control, and sanitation — essentially the whole city. And now just about the whole county including the sheriff is on the system. In addition, the highway patrol uses some of the talk groups. At peak times the system is at between 20% and 26% of capacity. So it is an efficient system but you have to know how to manage it. Fayetteville has certain requirements. They use 10/4 codes. You are not allowed to get on the system and “gab.” This Motorola 800-MHz system also has a telephone interconnect capability so you can use it like a telephone, but Fayetteville does not allow people to use that feature — except perhaps for a few people — because it will tie up the system.
So we will know where the State is going, here is information about some of the 800-MHz radio systems around North Carolina. Most major cities now are on 800-MHz trunking including Tarboro, Rocky Mount, Charlotte, Durham, Asheville, Wilmington, Fayetteville, and Greensboro. Tarboro is one of the first communities in North Carolina to implement an 800-MHz radio system and they are still using it. Several years ago radio communications personnel in these cities formed a committee called the North Carolina SmartNet Users Network. SmartNet is a Motorola trademark for public-safety radio communications systems. These 800-MHz radio systems meet the requirements of APCO, the Association for Police Communication Officers. The SmartNet Users Network group meets once per quarter. All of the above systems are Motorola systems. The statewide APCO Convention will be held at the Hilton in Wilmington about September 23rd and we should try to have someone attend. One afternoon will be devoted to the SmartNet Users Group. The attendees of this user’s group are all the 800-MHz users, statewide. They will have training sessions talking about new products.
We should talk with appropriate personnel within State government to see what their infrastructure plans are for 800-MHz trunking. The State will do with voice what it has done with mobile data terminals. North Carolina has already started a statewide communications system of mobile data terminals, but it is a separate system from voice communications. Agencies across the state will have the ability to communicate one with another, and will have access to DCI. The state now wants to follow the data network with a voice network. So all SmartNet voice systems throughout the state will be tied together. In the event of an emergency, it will simplify communications. The State already has started to move toward the 800-MHz trunking voice system by buying the system used for the Special Olympics. The first phase of this was supposed to have been started this year, but it has been delayed because of the need for state funds for Hurricane Floyd victims. The State may buy the channels for the towers so that all the Town has to do is buy the radios. We would then pay the State x dollars per month per radio to use the system. The state currently is charging $6 per month per mobile data terminal for access to the system. We should talk with Mike Hodgson in Engineering with Highway Patrol to learn more about what the State is planning. We should find out how the Highway Patrol plans on covering the Orange County area, and then that might tell us the direction they are going in terms of allowing non-public safety departments access to the 800-MHz radio system.
The formal title of the State system probably will be Criminal Justice Information Network (CJIN). Price-Waterhouse did a study for the State in the early 90s and recommended that the data system and the voice system be totally separate. Motorola agrees with this recommendation. Constant data transmission tends to tie up the repeaters and thereby delay or block voice communication. We do not need to worry about repeaters for mobile data transmission because the State already is taking care of that. The towers being used for data transmission probably can be used for voice also — with additional repeater equipment, of course. At present, use of the mobile data system is for public safety only, thus Transportation and Public Works cannot now use it. More than likely some number of the existing towers can be used for the 800-MHz system. All of the Motorola 800-MHz radio systems statewide will be tied together with a SmartZone switch.
After we make this a project, Motorola will assign engineers to it to make coverage maps to determine where antenna sites are needed and how tall the towers need to be for the type of coverage we want. Mobile coverage requires one level of transmission while coverage inside a building in the county requires another. If we deal with Motorola, they will assign a project manager and a team of engineers (including a design engineer) to this project. They will have contracts that will be negotiated. The Town needs a committee of people who can dedicate time to this project.
There are two ways that Motorola can proceed to do the study that is needed to specify the required system. First, we can pay them to come in and do a survey including coverage maps. Or we can put together a request for proposal if we are serious that we are going to do something. In this latter case we should have money appropriated before asking them to proceed. Basically, Motorola probably could give us a rough idea of coverage requirements and cost by just looking at maps.
When Durham implemented their three-site, simulcast system about four years ago the cost was about $8 million. Many towns have made these systems pay for themselves. For example, when Fayetteville bought its system, they talked to the County about coming on the system. The County decided to do so and the City charged the County $10 per radio per month to use the system. The County agencies now consider this a bargain, plus it gives the City necessary income to maintain the system. Fayetteville now is planning to convert from an analog/digital to a pure digital radio communications system. Fayetteville (with the agencies of Cumberland County and the NC Highway Patrol) now has about 3000 radios on the system.
Fayetteville has done a good job planning, implementing and managing their 800-MHz radio system. They formed an oversight committee. At their meetings they have not only representatives from all City user departments (police, fire, etc.) and other agencies (Sheriff, Highway Patrol), but also the Motorola marketing rep, the Motorola technical support personnel, and the telephone company rep. Unlike some other cities, Fayetteville initially developed essentially a contract stating the requirements to use the system (e.g. how you use the system, what type of radios — nothing other than SmartNet), and they established good records about who had radios and what the serial numbers of these radios were. No one on the Fayetteville 800-MHz radio system is allowed to use it for private telephone calls. The 800-MHz system is designed for dispatch — for brief two-way communication. Fayetteville now may have disconnected totally their telephone interconnection capability. One phone call ties up a repeater. They do not allow “private calls” except to some of the command supervisors. Fayetteville also started charging users from day one, not later. (For further information, we should consider a visit to Fayetteville to see the system and meet with the committee that manages it.)
How are different counties paying for the 800-MHz trunking system? First, it usually involves getting Council on board. Also there is the issue of revenue sharing. A lot of the cities charge every department for the use of the radio system. This is based on the number of radios used per department. That money goes into the “communications pool.” Another consideration is whether to lease or lease/purchase the system. Normally Motorola tries to project the price of the system out over (say) five years. An organization would pay so much a month for five years and then at the end of that time they could buy out the lease, keep on paying the lease payment, or return the equipment and re-negotiate the lease for new equipment.
The State planned to pay for 800-MHz voice system just as they are for the data system. The State would provide the infrastructure (the repeaters) while the using agency would provide the radios. These agencies then would pay the State so much a month for each radio that uses the system. Starting this past year, State government (COSMO or crime commission?) grants were available to implement the data side and they are now doing this for the voice side. So you can get money from state government to help offset the cost of an 800-MHz radio system. We should contact our local State representatives concerning this.
Motorola dealers are not allowed to sell public-safety radio communications systems. Instead you must deal directly with the company through its radio networks representative — Dene Haugland in North Carolina. Motorola’s primary competitor is Ericsson. Hickory and Dunn use Ericsson’s system, but these are not compatible with the Motorola system.
APPENDIX IV. CONDITION OF THE TOWN RADIO SYSTEM
Jane Cousins of the Chapel Hill Police Department reported on 22 September 2000 that Officer Jack Terry obtained the following information about the condition of the present radio system from Piedmont Communications, the company that maintains it.
· The repeaters are over 30 years old.
· Originally each repeater broadcast at 75 watts per unit, but presently the repeaters are operating (on a good day) at only 12 watts each.
· Drivers were installed to boost the repeaters from 12 to 75 watts, but the drivers burned out. Such drivers are no longer manufactured or available.
· Other parts also are wearing out. Some can be replaced, whereas others cannot.
· To replace one of the current repeaters with an intermittent-duty repeater (which Piedmont Communications does not recommend for the Town) would cost $8,000 per repeater. Continuous-duty 40-watt repeaters cost $17,000-$20,000 each.
This Appendix presents information gathered from Mike Hodgson of the State Highway Patrol by Jane Cousins (Police Department) about Statewide plans for an 800-MHz trunking radio system, and reported by her on 5 September 2000.
· The state is moving toward a coordinated statewide trunking communications system. Initially the State purchased 400 radios for State’s law enforcement officers (Highway Patrol, Department of Motor Vehicles and Corrections) and they used the broadcast towers owned by local governments. The State started in the Charlotte area and has expanded to Durham, Greensboro, Wake Co, etc.
· Last year the State purchased a 7-tower system from Motorola that was built for the Special Olympics. State Capital Police and Butner’s Public Safety are using these towers. One of these towers is located in Chatham County’s near the Channel 4 television tower.
· By the end of this year Mr. Hodgson expects that Chatham, Lee, Johnson, Wilson, and Granville Counties will be using State-owned broadcast towers. Alamance County is going to use the Guilford County’s towers.
· In Wake County there are 250 police radios and 450 non-public safety radios using the State system. But Mr. Hodgson was clear that the Federal Communications Commission and the NC Attorney General have been studying this issue. He does not believe that, in general, the statewide system will be used for anything other than Police, Fire, and Emergency Medical Services.
· When Chapel Hill’s multi-jurisdictional situation was explained to Mr. Hodgson, he said that not all agencies have to switch to trunking at the same time. As long as everyone was planning to move to the new system, there could be links between conventional and trunking systems during the transition.
ADSL See “DSL”.
ARC/INFO GIS software that creates and edits maps. Arc refers to the graphic side and Info refers to the data side.
Bit Binary digit. A single bit can hold only one of two values: 0 or 1.
bps Bits per second, a unit of data transmission speed. It takes approximately 10 bits to represent one alphanumeric character (i.e. a letter or a digit). Therefore, a transmission speed of 1000 bits per second delivers about 100 characters per second.
Byte A small group of bits used together to represent a piece of information, typically an alphanumeric character. A byte is also the unit of storage capacity required to hold those bits. By far the most common byte size is 8 bits.
CD Compact disk
CD tower Multiple CD units, each containing an on-line CD, mounted in a “tower,” and accessible remotely
CHPL Chapel Hill Public Library
CJIN Criminal Justice Information Network, the network of 800-MHz towers spread across the State that permits data exchange over radio modems. The CJIN network provides Police Department laptops with the ability to communicate with remote resources. DCI provides responses to requests for specific law enforcement data and uses the CJIN network to relay that information to Police Department laptops.
CTC Citizens’ Technology Committee, which reports to Council
Data transfer rate Speed with which data can be transmitted from one device to another. Typical data transfer rates associated with various media are as follows:
Modem 28.8 – 56 Kbps
ISDN 64 – 128 Kbps
DSL 128 Kbps – 1.1 Mbps
T1 1.544 Mbps
Ethernet 10 Mbps
Fast Ethernet 100 Mbps
Gigabit Ethernet 1000 Mbps
Fiber Optic 10 – 2500 Mbps
DBMS Database management system, software to manage the storing and retrieval of data
DCI Division of Criminal Information, a branch of the State Bureau of Investigation. DCI processes all requests for information such as license plate/driver's license, wants/warrants, etc.
DSL Digital Subscriber Line, which carries data at high speeds over standard copper telephone wires. Symmetric DSL (SDSL) offers data-only capability with equal upload and download speeds; asymmetric DSL (ADSL) combines voice and data on the same line, but with lower upload than download speeds.
Domain On the Internet, a domain consists of a set of network addresses that are related in a prescribed manner.
Ethernet A widely implemented LAN protocol that supports data transfer rates of 10 Mbps or higher over copper wires.
FCC Federal Communications Commission
Fiber network A network built with the use of fiber-optic cables. Electrical signals are translated by a laser into pulses of light that are sent along glass filaments. Less susceptible to noise and interference than other kinds of cables, optical fibers can transmit data greater distances without amplification. Because the glass filaments are fragile, optical fiber is typically run underground rather than overhead on telephone poles.
Firewall A set of related programs, located at a network gateway, that protect the resources of a private network from users on other networks
Gateway A network point that acts as an entrance to another network
GIS Geographic information system, software that performs spatial analysis with a relational database
Internet A set of interconnected computer networks. When written with a capital “I”, reference is to the publicly accessible worldwide set of networks. See also “ISP”.
Intranet Network internal to an enterprise and not accessible by the public
IP Internet Protocol, an engineering protocol that governs much of the data transmission over networks
IP address A unique address that identifies a device connected to the Internet
ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network, an international standard for wide-bandwidth digital transmission of voice, video, and data over the public switched telephone network. It requires special equipment attached to the phone line. Under ISDN, a phone call can transfer 64 Kbps. Two lines can be used to provide 128 Kbps.
ISP Internet Service Provider, a company that provides end users access to the Internet
ITS The State of North Carolina’s Information Technology Services group
Kbps Kilo bps, or one thousand bps
LAN Local Area Network, a short-distance network used to link a group of computers together within a small geographical area. LANs are typically limited to distances of less than 500 meters and provide low-cost, high-bandwidth networking capabilities typically within a building.
Map coverage A map layer in GIS that contains one or more geographical features such as parcels, easements, building footprints, or elevation contours. In GIS, coverages can be placed on top of other coverage to produce a mosaic (e.g. soils and zoning laid over a parcel).
MB (for Megabyte) A unit of computer storage capacity, equal to approximately one million (actually 1,048,576 = 220) bytes (see “Byte”). This entire report occupies less than a third of a MB of storage.
Mbps Mega bps, or one million bps
MHz Megahertz, or one million cycles per second, a unit of frequency
Modem (from modulator-demodulator) A device that converts signals between digital and analog form, thus enabling a computer to send and receive digital data over conventional analog telephone lines
NC LIVE North Carolina Libraries for Virtual Education
Orthophoto Computer rectified photograph that represents a flat, accurate geometric plane based on the state plane coordinate program and serves as a base map for all map coverage
Planimetric A GIS coverage that represents features on the ground (e.g. buildings, fences, trees, parking lots) as graphic rather than data elements. It is useful for attaching data to a ground feature such as an address to a building or the number of playing fields on a park site.
Proxy server A network server that acts as a gateway between a local area network and the Internet. The software components can be configured to perform a number of security and network performance improvement tasks.
Relational database Simple database systems store data in a single table referred to as a flat file. Relational database systems can use multiple tables to store data, and each table can have a different record format. Relational systems are more suitable for large applications, but flat databases are adequate for many small applications.
SDSL See “DSL”.
Spatial analysis Ability to analyze the relationship between a geographical feature (e.g. tree, house, fire hydrant) and its location
SQL (pronounced “sequel”) Structured Query Language, an English-like (so long as you talk like a programmer), standardized language used to define, manipulate, and query data in a database server.
T1 A system that transfers digital signals at 1.544 Mbps
Telnet A protocol that is commonly used for accessing someone else’s computer, assuming they have given you permission.
Topography Elevation values for the vertical distance above or below sea level and drawn as contours linking sites of equal elevation.
UHF Ultra-High Frequency: transmission between 470 and 890 MHz
UNC-CH University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
VHF Very-High Frequency: transmission between 50 and 216 MHz
WAN Wide Area Network, a computer network of larger geographical extent than a LAN. Wide area networks can be made up of interconnected smaller networks spread throughout a building, a state, or the entire globe. Remote sites are typically connected using commercial data transmission facilities such as ISDN, DSL, or T1 data lines.
Windows A family of Microsoft operating systems for server, desktop, and laptop computers. The major members used by the Town are Windows NT and Windows 2000.
World-Wide Web A distributed application program that permits users at different points
(also WWW) on the Internet to exchange data
[1] North Carolina Public Library Director's Association, 1998 Guidelines for North Carolina Public Libraries.
[2] Library Needs Assessment Task Force Report, June 14, 1999
[3] North Carolina Public Library Director's Association, 1998 Guidelines for North Carolina Public Libraries.
[4] Excerpted from Geoffrey Nunberg of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The article can be found at www.prospect.org/archives/41/41nunb.html