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A locker is a small, usually narrow storage compartment. They are commonly found in dedicated cabinets, very often in large numbers, in various public places such as locker rooms, workplaces, schools, transport hubs and the like. They vary in size, purpose, construction, and security.
Lockers are normally quite narrow, of varying heights and tier arrangements. Width and depth usually conform to standard measurements, although non-standard sizes are occasionally found. Public places with lockers often contain large numbers of them, such as in a school. They are usually made of painted sheet metal.
The characteristics that usually distinguish them from other types of cabinet or cupboard or storage container are:
Lockers are usually physically joined side by side in banks, and are commonly made from steel, although wood, laminate, and plastic are other materials sometimes found. Steel lockers which are banked together share side walls, and are constructed by starting with a complete locker; further lockers may then be added by constructing the floor, roof, rear wall, door, and just one extra side wall, the existing side wall of the previous locker serving as the other side wall of the new one. The walls, floors, and roof of lockers may be either riveted together (the more traditional method) or, more recently, welded together.
Locker doors usually have some kind of ventilation to provide for the flow of air to aid in cleanliness. These vents usually take the form of a series of horizontal angled slats at the top and bottom of the door, although sometimes parallel rows of small square or rectangular holes are found instead, running up and down the door. Less often, the side or rear walls may also have similar ventilation.
Locker doors usually have door stiffeners fixed vertically to the inside of the door, in the form of a metal plate welded to the inner surface, and protruding outward a fraction of an inch, thus adding to the robustness of the door and making it harder to force open.
Lockers are often manufactured by the same companies who produce filing cabinets, stationery cabinets (occasionally wrongly referred to as lockers), steel shelving, and other products made from sheet steel.
There are a number of features or characteristics which may vary in lockers. Because purchasers will need to specify what they want in each of these when ordering, it is more common to order a particular configuration rather than buy "off the shelf" in a shop, although certain very common configurations can be found in shops fairly easily. These features include:
Historically, lockers have been a space to store personal belongings secured by various locking mechanisms. The earliest modern lockers were simple ‘box with a lock’ type device likely used for sporting purposes. The ‘locker room’ was a place for athletes to store their clothing, belongings and equipment temporarily. People could retrieve their items by using their specific key assigned to them when they selected the locker space. As lockers became more commonplace, they started appearing in educational facilities, hospitals, gymnasiums and in the workplace.
Lockers initially were cabinet-like and made of wood and later made of steel and metal. Lockers have since evolved with peoples needs and breakthrough technologies. Today lockers can be manufactured out of various materials and to suit the décor of the environment they are in. Metal, steel, plastic, wood and fabricated wood are all popular materials that are used.
The lock mechanism on a locker has especially evolved with the induction of new technologies. The movement from a large padlock and key to an electronic system, illustrates how lockers have adopted smart technology. Smart technology allows lockers to be digital, flexible in use and equipped with various features to improve the user experience.
Smart lockers are digitally managed storage banks which makes the experience of acquiring and using a locker fast and efficient. Whether it's controlled by a mobile phone app or a touchless kiosk, the technology allows for automation throughout the entire process/workflow.
There are a number of less standard lockers that are offered by various manufacturers. These include:
After the COVID-19 pandemic of 2019, office workers only went into offices for part of their working week for social distancing. Hybrid working, defined as “team or organisation work part of their time at the workplace and part remotely”, [1] has made the workplace more flexible. The reduced number of employees coming to the office made companies start cutting cost and the space of their offices, and looking for technologies that can enhance their workplace productivity, efficiency, and employee experience. [2]
With the rise of hybrid working, traditional lockers no longer serves the purpose for a modern workplace that empowers its people. [3] [4] Agile lockers is a new term that used for an agile workplace, where employee experiences are being prioritised while saving office space and cost.
There are also several types of doorless locker design including those that are cylindrical, spherical and cone-shaped. One such design eliminates the use of doors by offering a cylinder open at the front to receive items and can then be rotated to secure the contents.
Some schools in the United States have been reported to have abolished the use of lockers. Security concerns are cited as the reason for this, with the concern being that lockers may be used to store contraband such as weapons, drugs or pornographic material. [5] There has been some controversy over in what circumstances school authorities or law-enforcement officials are permitted to search lockers, with or without informing the users, or with or without the users being present at the time of the search, and it has been considered a civil liberties issue, particularly in the U.S.
Other advocates of lockerless schools also cite reasons such as reducing noise by eliminating the clang of dozens of locker doors, [5] or creating a more appealing environment aesthetically. It has also been claimed that removing lockers provides good training for students by forcing them to be more efficient in managing their books, and taking the time to plan what books they will need, and carrying only those ones.
In schools without lockers, students are sometimes provided with two complete sets of textbooks, one set being kept at school for use in class, and the other being kept at home for referring to for homework, thus limiting the amount of heavy carrying that would otherwise be required without having lockers to store them in between classes. [5] However, research has shown an increase in the incidence of back injuries in some students, which has been directly attributed to the lack of lockers for storing books in, thus forcing students to spend more time carrying heavy loads of books in backpacks.
Some students oppose the abolition of lockers, arguing that their locker is one of the few private spaces they have in an environment which is otherwise communal and impersonal.
Coin-operated public luggage lockers can be present in bus stations and rail stations. In some countries they were commonplace from the 1950s to the 1970s, but eliminated for concern that bombs may be hidden in them. Some airports have also removed them for this reason.
A door is a hinged or otherwise movable barrier that allows ingress (entry) into and egress (exit) from an enclosure. The created opening in the wall is a doorway or portal. A door's essential and primary purpose is to provide security by controlling access to the doorway (portal). Conventionally, it is a panel that fits into the doorway of a building, room, or vehicle. Doors are generally made of a material suited to the door's task. They are commonly attached by hinges, but can move by other means, such as slides or counterbalancing.
A colocation center or "carrier hotel", is a type of data centre where equipment, space, and bandwidth are available for rental to retail customers. Colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, and physical security for the server, storage, and networking equipment of other firms and also connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers with a minimum of cost and complexity.
A combination lock is a type of locking device in which a sequence of symbols, usually numbers, is used to open the lock. The sequence may be entered using a single rotating dial which interacts with several discs or cams, by using a set of several rotating discs with inscribed symbols which directly interact with the locking mechanism, or through an electronic or mechanical keypad. Types range from inexpensive three-digit luggage locks to high-security safes. Unlike ordinary padlocks, combination locks do not use keys.
A safe is a secure lockable enclosure used for securing valuable objects against theft or fire. A safe is usually a hollow cuboid or cylinder, with one face being removable or hinged to form a door. The body and door may be cast from metal or formed out of plastic through blow molding. Bank teller safes typically are secured to the counter, have a slit opening for dropping valuables into the safe without opening it, and a time-delay combination lock to foil thieves. One significant distinction between types of safes is whether the safe is secured to a wall or structure or if it can be moved around.
A bank vault is a secure space where money, valuables, records, and documents are stored. It is intended to protect their contents from theft, unauthorized use, fire, natural disasters, and other threats, much like a safe. Unlike safes, vaults are an integral part of the building within which they are built, using armored walls and a tightly fashioned door closed with a complex lock.
A letter box, letterbox, letter plate, letter hole, mail slot or mailbox is a receptacle for receiving incoming mail at a private residence or business. For outgoing mail, post boxes are often used for depositing the mail for collection, although some letter boxes are also capable of holding outgoing mail for a carrier to pick up. Letterboxes or mailboxes use the following primary designs:
A crash bar is a type of door opening mechanism which allows users to open a door by pushing a bar. While originally conceived as a way to prevent crowd crushing in an emergency, crash bars are now used as the primary door opening mechanism in many commercial buildings.
A filing cabinet is a piece of office furniture for storing paper documents in file folders. In the most simple context, it is an enclosure for drawers in which items are stored. The two most common forms of filing cabinets are vertical files and lateral files. A vertical file cabinet has drawers that extend from the short side of the cabinet. A lateral file cabinet has drawers that extend from the long side of the cabinet. These are also called side filers in Great Britain. There are also shelf files which go on shelves. In the United States, file cabinets are usually built to accommodate 8.5 × 11 paper, and in other countries, filing cabinets are often designed to hold other sizes of paper, such as A4 paper.
A door handle or doorknob is a handle used to open or close a door. Door handles can be found on all types of doors including exterior doors of residential and commercial buildings, internal doors, cupboard doors and vehicle doors. There are many designs of door handle, depending on the appropriate use. A large number of handles, particularly for commercial and residential doors, incorporate latching or locking mechanisms or are manufactured to fit to standardised door locking or latching mechanisms.
A bicycle lock is a security device used to deter bicycle theft, either by simply locking one of the wheels or by fastening the bicycle to a fixed object, e.g., a bike rack.
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An electronic lock is a locking device which operates by means of electric current. Electric locks are sometimes stand-alone with an electronic control assembly mounted directly to the lock. Electric locks may be connected to an access control system, the advantages of which include: key control, where keys can be added and removed without re-keying the lock cylinder; fine access control, where time and place are factors; and transaction logging, where activity is recorded. Electronic locks can also be remotely monitored and controlled, both to lock and to unlock.
A wafer tumbler lock is a type of lock that uses a set of flat wafers to prevent the lock from opening unless the correct key is inserted. This type of lock is similar to the pin tumbler lock and works on a similar principle. However, unlike the pin tumbler lock, where each pin consists of two or more pieces, each wafer in the lock is a single piece. The wafer tumbler lock is often incorrectly referred to as a disc tumbler lock, which uses an entirely different mechanism.
A bicycle locker or bike box is a locker or box in which bicycles can be placed and locked, usually 1 or 2 per locker. They are usually provided at places where numerous cyclists need bike parking for extended times, yet where the bikes might otherwise get damaged or stolen.
A car door is a type of door opening, typically hinged on its front edge, but sometimes attached by other mechanisms such as tracks, for entering and exiting a vehicle. Doors most often integrate side windows for visibility from inside the car and can be locked to secure the vehicle.
Three-point locking, or a multipoint lock, is a locking system installed in cabinet or locker doors to enable more secure locking. Whereas in single-point locking, the door on a cabinet locks only at the point where the key is turned, halfway up the edge of the door, three-point locking enables the top and bottom of the door to be simultaneously secured. This is accomplished by attaching two long steel rods to the lock on the inside of the door, which extend vertically upwards and downwards: when the lock is turned, the rotary movement of the latch on the inside of the door translates to vertical movement in these rods, with the result that the upper rod moves upwards by an inch or so, and the lower rod moves downwards similarly. This causes the ends of the rods to move through small holes in the flanges at the top and bottom of the door, resulting from the metal of the door being turned inwards, and the rods then move a short distance into holes in the metal surrounding the door. This effectively immobilizes the top and bottom of the door, and greatly increases the security of the door-locking compared to a door with only single-point locking.
Single-point locking is a locking system in cabinet doors where locking takes places only at the point halfway up the edge of the door, where the latch engages with the doorjamb. The term is most often used in items like lockers, where it is contrasted with the much more secure three-point locking, which uses movable rods to secure the top and bottom of the door when the door is locked, and the term is not normally used in situations where single-point locking is the only option normally found.
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A cabinet is a case or cupboard with shelves or drawers for storing or displaying items. Some cabinets are stand alone while others are built in to a wall or are attached to it like a medicine cabinet. Cabinets are typically made of wood, coated steel, or synthetic materials. Commercial grade cabinets usually have a melamine-particleboard substrate and are covered in a high-pressure decorative laminate, commonly referred to as Wilsonart or Formica.
A safety cabinet is used for the safe storage of flammable chemical substance or compressed gas cylinders.
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