During Finals week, my roomate and I were frustrated that we couldn't find seats to study at our Library. So we decided to try and crowdsource our way into finding us a table to study. We created WhereCanIStudy.com.
The response for this site wasn't good - I was able to learn some key concepts. I was able to learn the fact that individuals don't usually want to have to register an account to be able to post a study group or a seat that is available. However, for me it was a good experience as I was able to find one seat the day before my final exam because someone posted it on there.
To create the site I used PHP, MYSQL, and some old registration/login scripts I had. It was a pretty quick and easy implementation of the solution after I did some testing. My testing was primarily to ask individuals if this was a problem and it seemed to be a problem.
In the future I'm going to make some improvements to the site. I'm going to add an image of the whole library with different floors and let the people click on the floor they are on using floor numbers. I'm going to try and make it as simplistic as possible and potentially even a mobile app. The database structure and designs are already there so it wouldn't be too hard to create a basic API and a basic Objective-C or web based mobile app.
And yes - it actually is frustrating to find a place to study at NYU. We have 40,000 students who are trying to find and clamp into one library. It's kinda boring and a waste of time to walk around the whole library in search for a table.