Kings College London

Kings College London is one of the world’s leading universities with a very long and distinguished history. The College is at the centre of a wide range of cutting edge research, as well as top quality teaching and learning. For over 180 years King’s has made an extraordinary contribution to modern life.

The College has five campuses in London and has a community of more than 25,000 students, 6,500 staff and tens of thousands of former students and staff that make up the King’s ‘family’.

The College has a renowned reputation in the humanities, law, sciences including health areas, such as psychiatry, medicine, nursing and dentistry and social sciences, including international affairs. All of these subjects and the array of other subjects benefit from the use of IT; with this in mind the College decided to loan laptops out to the students to help with their work and to heighten their student experience. King’s initially bought five LapSafe® Ambassador™ units and staff manually loaned the laptops out to students. However, the College found that outside of the staffed hours, they could not offer the use of the loan laptops as there were no members of staff to sign them in and out. The College offers a 24 hour library between March and June, so having no access to laptop loans meant that the students had no flexibility to use these resources after a certain period of time. To tackle this problem the College contacted LapSafe® to find the best suited Diplomat™ to meet their needs.

LapSafe® Products have been the market leaders in managing storage and charging solutions for devices in volume, and had recently designed and manufactured a range of self-service loan charging lockers for laptops, netbooks, tablets and iPads.

Matt Couzens, Service Improvement Coordinator at Kings College said, “We were lending laptops using the Ambassador™ and members of staff were doing it manually behind a desk. It was really time consuming and our libraries are only staffed until 8.30pm, meaning that students only had a limited time to borrow a laptop. We approached LapSafe® for a solution as we already had a relationship with them and because they are the market leaders

Kings College London have six LapSafe® Diplomat™ units located at different libraries across the campus, 2 × 12 bay, 1 × 24 bay and 3 × 48 bay. All units are linked to their Library Management System (LMS), Ex Libris Aleph so that the College can track who has loaned a laptop, for how long and if they have returned it in time.

Matt Couzens also added, “The product is exactly what we needed and the customer service is great. We recently had a group of school students touring through our campuses; they were bored out of their minds, dragging their feet and were almost falling asleep. When they saw the LapSafe® Diplomat™ laptop cabinets and the staff on the tour explained what they were, the students faces lit up knowing that we lend laptops for free. They were amazed that this was possible; LapSafe® have revolutionised the way that our library works”.