International Foundation for Cultural Property Protection

The article was published in the Security Director News (Business News for Security Practitioners) website on 3.22.2011.

By Leischen Stelter

TOLEDO, Ohio—Protecting 30,000 works of art when more than 430,000 people visit the Toledo Museum of Art each year requires a combination of security measures. The most important security asset will always be security officers, said Tim Szczepanski, chief of protective services for the museum. “I’ve never been a believer in replacing people with technology, although I would like to have the latest and greatest technology available,” he said. “But I don’t think there are any machines out there that can talk to someone and have an inkling about what a person is up to or be suspicious of someone. There’s no substitute for a good security officer.” The museum employs and rotates 80 part-time proprietary guards, which complements its full-time contract guard force.

However, Szczepanski said he recognizes the value of technology as part of his overall security program and has made a big push to improve the museum’s video surveillance system. When he first joined the museum 18 years ago, there were only 15 cameras in place, eight or 10 of which worked at any given time, he said. Now the museum has more than 250 cameras. The museum also has an advanced security alarm system in its galleries as well as in its storage areas and on individual pieces of art. The alarms use a mixture of motion, glass break and other detection systems that alert authorities of issues.

The museum has also improved its access control system. It uses a card access system in its storage areas, but primarily uses a key-based system to allow access to certain areas of the museum. The museum recently adopted a key-control system from Morse Watchmans, which allows employees to use a personal identification number to access keys. Szczepanski said the key-control system has made employees more accountable. “When people obtain a set of keys this way they think about it more than when they swipe a card in a reader,” he said. “They know the keys are being issued to them and it’s being recorded in their name, so for that reason we haven’t had a problem with employees giving out their PIN numbers.”

The system has also been effective in reducing the number of lost keys and the museum has not lost a single key ring since putting the system in place, he said. Szczepanski said he regularly runs reports of overdue keys to notify employees if keys haven’t returned in a timely fashion, but also to make sure keys haven’t been lost. This is a vast improvement over the old system, which was basically a guard handing out keys and recording the name of the person along with the date and time. “Accountability was basically nonexistent and we never knew where to start looking if a key came up missing,” he said.

Szczepanski said it is simple to reprogram the system now to give new employees permission to certain rooms, but the system did require some time to initially set up. With more than 200 key rings, it took about three weeks to physically program employee information into the database, assign key permissions as well as PIN numbers. But after that initial set up, it just takes a few keystrokes to make the necessary changes, he said.