Unattended Equipment Loan System?

captnitro asks: "I run a small media lab for a department at a large public university. We have about 120 faculty and and equal number of graduate students who from time to time need things like digital cameras, video equipment, projectors, EyeOne units, and so on. (While there is a central location on campus for students, faculty and staff to get some of this equipment, we stock a few specialized pieces that our faculty need.) Since I'm out of the office a lot, I'm looking for a clever way of loaning out equipment that doesn't involve me being there and is secure enough that our administrators deem it "theft resistant" enough to implement. I've looked into small safes with PINs, or card readers (all faculty have IDs with magstripes), blah blah blah, but most of these are prohibitively expensive, so I'm thinking of hacking something together myself.. though I have no idea how I'd do that. Any thoughts?" Solutions could range from the clever and mixed tech (cheap locked boxes with combinations sent through encrypted e-mail), through high tech (use of the existing ID cards system) to unlock delivery boxes. If you were going to set up a system like this, how would you do it?

Comments

Perfect solution

[DarkKaplah]

Hire a student to do this. I was a student in a university and I'm rather erked at the number of jobs that used to be for work study, and are now being phased out thanks to half baked tech replacements. A homemade system will never be as secure as having a human being there to verify ID and record who checked out what. A work study student would cost you nothing, and give someone the ability to collect their financial aid. Why are we trying to replace jobs a person could do in a recession?

Ditto: Hire a Work-study

[jwold]

Create a win-win for you and a student.