The Metra Smart lockers, integrated with Wake Forest University’s RFID campus ID cards, allow students, faculty, and staff to retrieve their ordered materials on their own time—and it’s touchless. The result? A solution that’s still big on service and bigger on efficiency. The versatile exchange of goods lockers, enabled by the Metra Smart Locker System.

The Z. Smith Reynolds Library (or ZSR for short), provides services to over 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students at Wake Forest University, a private research university in North Carolina, USA.
Prior to the library’s exchange of goods lockers, the library had a system for fulfilling reference material requests — but it was one predicated on human contact and movement. When COVID-19 started to become a reality in the United States, and campus buildings across the country were shutting down, the library’s Associate Dean, Mary Beth Lock, and her staff members realized that while it was born out of necessity, the situation gave them an opportunity to understand if they could still provide the same level of service with a contactless solution.
For the first few months, the library utilized a bank of day-use lockers with pin padlocks — and library staff quickly realized that the solution wouldn’t work in the long run. Books, reference materials, and even computers that faculty would send to the University’s tech department — would need to be placed in these lockers — and housing a valuable computer in a paper bag was not going to cut it. The library had to trust everyone accessing the locker bank to use the honor system and only take what belonged to them.
The University’s RFID system — the same system used for the school’s campus ID cards — is integrated with the Metra Smart locker system in their exchange of goods lockers, so “it tells the locker system who’s coming to pick up the materials,” says James Harper, Interim Director of Access Services at ZSR.
The smart locker bank is equipped with Metra’s 10-inch touchscreen, external Metra barcode Reader, and Metra RFID Reader. When students or faculty members approach the locker bank, they scan their card on the RFID reader (or Barcode on the barcode reader), and the locker door with their reserved items pops open — creating a touchless and contactless experience.
“The solution has been able to help us move quickly from our cobbled-together effort to something that fits so seamlessly it seems like it’s always been here.”