About this service

ANU Library study-space booking

Every study room and quiet seat across three ANU libraries, on one page. See at a glance what is free right now, book an hour in a single step, and hand it back when your plans change. One grid per library per day: rooms down the side, hours across the top, and every free cell is a link that books it.

Live at https://comp4020-crit7-hhhfff-hhhfff.fly.dev/.

  • 3 libraries
  • 15 bookable spaces
  • 14 days ahead
  • 2 hours per person per day

The app on a phone: the three libraries as small 3D buildings with Chifley picked in gold, then the Chifley grid, one card per room with its equipment and hours left today; free hours are raised tiles marked with a dot and the word Free, tinted warm to cool from morning to evening; booked hours are pressed-in tiles marked with a cross and the word Booked

Using it

  1. Find a space. Choose Chifley, Hancock or Menzies and a day. The grid marks every hour Free, Booked (✕) or Past, split into morning, afternoon and evening. Group rooms and single seats are listed apart, each with its equipment, any access caveat (⚠), and how many of the day’s hours are left.
  2. Book. Select a Free cell, enter your uID and name, press Book. You land on My bookings with a confirmation; if the slot was taken meanwhile or a rule stops you, you’re sent back with the reason and nothing is saved.
  3. My bookings. Lists your upcoming bookings (your uID is remembered in a cookie) with a Cancel button for each; a cancelled hour is free again at once.

The grid is live: keep it open in two tabs and book in one, and the other tab’s cell presses down to Booked without a reload.

There is no login: your uID is self-declared, so anyone who knows it could cancel your booking. A real version would sign in through ANU’s identity system.

What good looks like here

Finding a study room at ANU today means opening a separate booking system, picking a library, then clicking through rooms to find a free hour. What should exist instead is one page that answers “where can I sit at 2pm in Chifley?” in a single glance, and books it in one step.

Good, for this app, means:

  • Truthful availability. The grid shows what the database holds, and a slot someone else has just taken disappears from every open grid without a reload.
  • No double bookings, ever. Two people racing for the same room get one booking and one clear refusal. This is enforced by the database itself.
  • Fair rules, stated up front. One-hour slots between 08:00 and 22:00 Canberra time, up to 14 days ahead, at most 2 hours per person per day — the last two are ANU Library’s own rules for group study rooms.
  • Honest refusals. Every refused booking says why in plain English and changes nothing.
  • Works for everyone. Every page works without JavaScript, by keyboard, on a phone, and never says “free” or “taken” by colour alone. Depth and motion (the 3D library blocks, raised and pressed-in tiles, page transitions) only reinforce what the words already say, and everything holds still for anyone whose system asks for reduced motion.
  • Private by default. The grid says a room is Booked, never by whom; the live stream carries the slot, not the person.

What I looked at

ANU Library’s booking pages on LibCal and its “How do I book a group study room?” answer: bookings by uID, up to two hours a day, up to two weeks ahead, rooms listed with location, size and equipment. Chifley Library’s 2026 trial of bookable Level 2 computer desks and Level 3 study booths is why the app has single seats as well as rooms, and the library’s note that every room is wheelchair accessible and has power outlets except the Hancock basement room is carried into that room’s features.

What’s real and what’s illustrative

Real: the three library names, the 2-hour daily limit, the two-week window, the Chifley desks and booths, the Hancock basement room. Illustrative: every room number, capacity and equipment list, the space counts that follow from them, and the 08:00–22:00 hours (real opening hours vary by library and teaching period).

What I chose not to build

Sign-in (uID is self-declared, stated above), check-in codes and automatic release of no-shows, extending a booking, multi-hour bookings in one step, staff tools, and live occupancy sensors. Each is real in the library’s system; none is needed to show the one-glance grid working end to end.

Enforced versus judgement

Enforced by the checks in spec/: every page passes the accessibility floor (invariants.test.ts, with every page listed in spec/routes.ts); a booking persists across a reload; a double booking, a third hour in a day, a past or out-of-window slot, a malformed uID and an unknown space are refused with a reason and book nothing; six simultaneous requests for one slot produce exactly one booking; cancelling frees the slot and only the booker can cancel; bookings and cancellations are broadcast live and never name the booker; every grid cell states its status in words (booking.test.ts); the rules hold in Canberra time whatever the server’s clock (rules.test.ts).

Judgement, checked by hand in a browser: that the grid reads at a glance, that it works at 360px wide with no sideways page scroll, that the live update lands in a second open tab, that keyboard focus is visible and starts at the skip link, and that the design stays calm: one accent colour, depth only where it carries meaning, motion that stops when asked.

How it’s built

Astro renders every page on the server from SQLite (Drizzle ORM) on one Fly machine with one volume, so state survives reloads and redeploys. The schema and the seeded spaces are migrations applied at boot. A unique index on (space, date, hour) makes double booking impossible; the daily limit is checked in the same transaction as the insert. Forms POST and the server answers with a redirect, so nothing needs JavaScript; a small script subscribes to a server-sent-events stream to keep an open grid live. The interface is plain CSS: self-hosted Fraunces and Inter, 3D built from CSS transforms, and cross-document view transitions, with no front-end framework. The rules the agent was held to are in CLAUDE.md.