Multimedia Kiosks: A Metropolitan Police Perspective

Gary Fitzpatrick

The Metropolitan Police Service
Centre for Applied Research and Technology
Jubilee House
230-232 Putney Bridge Road,
London SW15 2PD

ATTACH stands for Advanced TransEuropean Telematics Applications for Community Help. It is a European project led by the Metropolitan Police Service which uses multimedia kiosks to bring information and advice to the community in Newham, North East London. At the touch of a screen a member of the public can have access to information about local council facilities and police services from kiosks installed in public places such as council offices, shopping precincts, leisure centres and police stations.

The Met has derived some important guidelines about successful deployment of public access networks which will be published as part of the European project. These include "It's not a kiosk project, it's an information project!", and "If it's broke, fix it now!". Attention has been paid to ensuring the users needs are met in relation to the design of the kiosk hardware, user interface design and kiosk location. A key message from our studies has been that it is vital to locate the kiosks where the public already go.

The ATTACH project was one of the first to use touch screen browsers and web technology to deliver service to the public user. One of the primary goals of ATTACH has been to ensure single data entry, and owner self-maintenance of data directly on the ATTACH database. This has been accomplished by using an Oracle database, which is maintained directly via the web from any "interneted computer" even over slow modems (14.4kbps). Web pages delivered on demand to the kiosk are built dynamically from suitable templates with the information extracted from the database.

How to evaluate kiosks and network information systems has been a major part of ATTACH, and the Met has driven the specification and production of management statistics to support the business cases for public sector and, in the future, possible private sectorparticipation. We expect an organic growth in kiosk, and terminal based information systems across London, and ATTACH will prepare the Met to deliver police information and service in support of the Met's policing strategy into the next millennium.