Happy Friday All,
I have an idea for an affordable way to do After Hours Pickup Lockers. I wanted to make sure this idea was working out before I shared it, and so far so good! We are about six weeks in and it has been going just fine. We have gotten some great feedback! They get used several times a week.
I wanted to add After Hours Pickup Lockers but we did not have a budget to spend thousands on a solution for this. So we got creative.
We are a Class 4 library in a mid-size residential plus some rural area and we used to have about 6000-7000 visitors a month but now we average 1000-2000 visitors a month.
So to do this project I purchased a set of Economy lockers on Uline: https://www.uline.com/Grp_608/Uline-Economy-Lockers. (around $600) that we could anchor to our exterior wall.
We added a nice vinyl sign to the top ($40) and we use these reprogrammable 4-letter word locks: https://www.amazon.com/Master-Lock-1535DWD-Combination-Assorted/dp/B009JTW84Y/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=amazon+combination+lock+four+letter+word&qid=1613764179&sr=8-3
(about $8 per lock) We put them right outside our front door which is on camera and lit at night. Our area is under our front covered porch and not out fully exposed in the weather so I am not sure if the locks would work as good out in the open. We keep our requests to same day, (or call Saturday for weekend pickup since we are closed Sundays.) Patrons call in on the day they want to pick up after hours and then we use our card catalog system (Verso) to email them their locker number and code for opening the lock.
We used our annual return on investment this year from our endowment fund to do this project so it was a cool PR tie also and way to bring awareness to our endowment funds. It was a neat new project for our community that expands our library service to 24-7.
Here is our Facebook post announcing these to our community which shows you pictures of how it turned out:
https://www.facebook.com/OtsegoDistrictLibrary/posts/3822103261143600
I also attached our Staff spreadsheet that details how our staff manages this and how we do the locks.
We have had great feedback on this project!
Andrea Estelle, MLIS
Brighten the Corner Where You Are!
Library Director ·
Otsego District Public Library
INNOVATE · INTERACT · INSPIRE
401 Dix Street, Otsego MI 49078
(269) 694-9690