Library Reserve
Keep a standing reservation for your favorite study room.
Motivation: UCSC is a crowded place, and it can be hard to find a place to do group work on campus.
Step 1: Get a group
The script runs fine enough with one person, but policy states you need at least two to reserve a room.
Step 2: Prepare Emails
This will require some coordination with your group members and a bit of legwork on your end.
Create a new alternate email account
This is the account that we’ll mostly be working with. It shouldn’t be associated with the school. I’ll be showing this with a gmail account.
Make an application password
This is needed for the script to interact with your email account.
Setup Forwarding
On the .edu emails that can be used to reserve a room, setup forwarding to the new email address.
This will require your groups coordination, as you may need to walk them through the steps, then have them enter a code that will be sent to your email address.
After that, you need them to set up relevant filters to forward you the confirmation emails.
email address to filter: alerts@mail.libcal.com
Filter the confirmations
on the target email account, set up a filter to label the confirmations being sent by you and your group mates
Label: Library
Step 3: Prepare your environment
At the very least you’ll need:
Python 3 - https://www.python.org/downloads/
A web driver, Ill be using chrome - https://chromedriver.chromium.org/getting-started
and a place you can set up a cron job on linux or scheduled task on windows.
Step 4: Fill out the script
You can download or clone it here.
Add the information about you and your group
This should be a list of strings, and index matters here, so the first email should correspond with the first first name and the first last name. Group name will be the same for all.
Email and Webdriver location
You may have your web driver installed elsewhere, but this is pretty straight forward.
Here is where you’ll be using that email and application password that you created earlier.
The Where
What room do you want reserved and where is it?
You’ll need to get the link to the library booking page and paste it in.
You will also be deciding on which room you want. Each room on the booking site has a name and capacity which you will need to copy and paste exactly to match the format shown.
The When
This will be specific to your wants and your room.
Some libraries are only open during certain times, and this even changes day to day, so be sure to check ahead of time or you might squander some of your slots.
You can only reserve 4 hours per .edu email address. Change the lists as needed to match the times you want.
Ensure that you have the same number of items in times_sets as you do .edu addresses.
Step 5: Let it run
Bookings open up at midnight, one week ahead, so that’s when the script should be running.
Since my groups were on campus everyday, I had mine set to run every night.
If you’re on windows, here is how to set up your task scheduler. If you’re on linux, you don’t need my help.
Create a new basic task
set for daily
at midnight
to run a program
python3 the-location-of-the-script/reserve_room.py
finish.
Notes
There are some quirks in the system that you’ll want to watch out for.
TA’s, Professors and the like can usually reserve a room/time slot for an entire quarter ahead of time, so you may need to change rooms at the start of each term.
The script runs well enough, but slows down with a large backlog of emails. I set the alternate email address to automatically delete emails that were over a week old.
Its a webdriver script, so you’ll actually get to watch it work.