Digital Event Documentation and Archive Platform

Abstract

Colleges hold many events every year, such as workshops, guest lectures, seminars and cultural programs. In most colleges the permission for an event travels on paper from the faculty to the Head of the Department (HOD) and then to the Principal, and the photos and the final report are kept in different places afterwards. This causes delay, confusion about the status of a request, and lost records. This paper presents the Digital Event Documentation and Archive Platform, a web application in which a faculty member creates an event, the HOD and the Principal approve or reject it in order, and the same event record is later used to store media files and generate a report. Every step sends a notification inside the website and by e-mail. The Principal works as the administrator who manages the HODs, and each HOD manages the faculty of his or her department. The system is built with React, Node.js, Express and MySQL. We describe the design, the roles, the event life cycle, the database and the security choices. Formal testing has not been carried out yet, so this paper does not claim performance numbers; a testing plan is given instead.

Introduction

The proposed system is a web-based College Event Management and Approval System designed to simplify the process of organizing, approving, conducting and documenting college events. Traditionally, event approvals require physical paperwork and multiple visits to the HOD and Principal, causing delays. After events, photos, attendance records and reports are often stored separately, making it difficult to retrieve information for future reference or accreditation.

The proposed system provides a centralized platform where faculty members can submit event requests, HODs and Principals can approve or reject them, and completed events can be archived with their photos and reports.

The system follows a three-tier architecture using React.js for the frontend, Node.js and Express.js for the backend, and MySQL for database management. It supports three user roles: Faculty, HOD and Principal, each with specific permissions.

Main Features

1. Online Event Approval: Events are submitted by faculty and follow a sequential approval process from HOD to Principal.

2. Role-Based Access: Faculty, HODs and Principals have different permissions based on their responsibilities and departments.

3. Notifications: Automatic website notifications and e-mails are sent whenever an event's status changes.

4. Rejection and Resubmission: Rejected events can be edited and resubmitted without losing previous approval history.

5. Event Archive: Completed events, photographs, attendance sheets and other documents are stored centrally.

6. Automatic Report Generation: Event reports are generated using previously submitted information, reducing manual work.

7. Search and Export: Archived events can be searched by date, department and event category, with reports available in PDF and CSV formats.

8. Security: JWT authentication, bcrypt password hashing, role-based authorization and input validation protect user information and event records.

Literature Survey and Research Gap

Previous systems have provided online event registration, single-level approvals, collaborative workflows, notifications and document storage. However, these solutions do not combine multi-level event approval, rejection and resubmission, media archiving and automatic report generation in one platform.

The proposed system addresses this gap by integrating all these functions into a single event management platform.

Conclusion

This paper presented the Digital Event Documentation and Archive Platform, which moves the approval of college events from paper to a web system and keeps the approval, media files and report of an event in one record. The Faculty, HOD and Principal roles follow the real structure of the college, rejection and re-submission are supported, and every step is notified inside the website and by email. The next step is to test the system with real users and report the results. Future work includes digital signatures for approvals, QR-code attendance, an analytics dashboard showing events per department and per year, a mobile application, pagination of long archive lists, and short summaries of event reports using artificial intelligence (AI).

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Jayalakshmi S, Monicka R, Monisha P. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.