UC Debuts Online Campus Room Reservation Tool

Student event organizers grappling with Harvard’s convoluted room reservation process may find their task a bit easier with the debut of the Undergraduate Council’s online room reservation tool.

The Student Life Committee posted a spreadsheet on the UC’s Web site on Sunday containing detailed information about all available space on campus, including room capacity, media capabilities, and contacts for reserving each room.

“We wanted to provide one spot online where students can see what rooms can be reserved on campus,” said committee chair Senan Ebrahim ’12.

Aggregating relevant information is the first step in the UC’s plan to reform the process of room reservations, which Black Students Association President Spencer H. Hardwick ’11, an inactive Crimson news editor, called “complicated” and “bureaucratic.”

“Almost every room has a different way to reserve it,” said Hardwick, who worked with the committee last semester to develop ideas to improve the system.

The committee has also partnered with Computer Science 50 instructor David J. Malan ’99 to integrate the room information into Malan’s maps.cs50.net interface, an interactive map of Harvard’s campus.

“He’s been a great resource,” committee member Allen Yang ’11 said of Malan, who is also working with the committee to develop an improved online student events calendar.

Yang, who worked on the room reservations initiative this semester, said that the next step is to create an online database for all available rooms. Students would be able to search by their desired parameters and view all available rooms that fit the criteria.

The UC plans to hire a student programmer to develop this feature with an estimated launch date of Feb. 2010, Ebrahim said.

The ultimate goal for the room reservations project is a centralized and integrated system that allows students to not only search for but also reserve their desired rooms, according to Ebrahim.

But this feature may not be available for over a year.

“At this time, there are too many logistical problems with decentralized building ownership,” Ebrahim said, as buildings across campus are under the jurisdiction of different bodies within the University.

Ebrahim said that the integrated reservation system the committee envisions has been received favorably by the Office of Student Life and may be launched concurrently with the office’s new House space management system in approximately a year and a half.

Hardwick said he was heartened by the UC’s efforts thus far to improve the room reservation process.

“Just the fact that things are being consolidated [into] a comprehensive form is very refreshing,” Hardwick said. “[The information] will definitely go a long way in helping make things easier for student organizations.”

—Staff writer Melody Y. Hu can be reached at melodyhu@fas.harvard.edu.