SCCFS: Filing System for St. Clare College of Caloocan Registrar

Abstract

The academic registrar’s office manages sensitive student records that require long-term confidentiality, integrity, and rapid accessibility. Traditional manual filing systems are prone to misfiling, physical degradation, and inefficient retrieval, while cloud-based alternatives introduce recurring costs, internet dependency, and data privacy concerns. This study presents the development of an offline-first, Electron-based desktop filing system tailored for the St. Clare College of Caloocan Registrar. The system integrates AES-256-GCM encryption for data-at-rest, SQLite-based metadata indexing for fast offline search, and chunked stream processing to securely handle academic documents up to 2 GB without compromising performance. Employing a mixed-methods approach, requirements were gathered through structured questionnaires and workflow analysis with seven registrar personnel, guiding an iterative software development lifecycle. The application features role-based access control, transparent encryption during upload, secure temporary preview, comprehensive audit logging, local backup/restore, and optional LAN-based sharing via OS-level protocols. Evaluation against documented requirement specifications confirms that the system successfully addresses critical operational gaps, providing a low-cost, connectivity-independent, and institutionally controlled alternative to manual and cloud-dependent solutions. The proposed system demonstrates strong applicability for improving record security, retrieval efficiency, and administrative productivity in resource-constrained academic environments, with direct relevance to Philippine higher education institutions transitioning from paper-based record management.