“To provide the university campus community with a structured, verified tool that streamlines lost item reporting, facilitates verified ownership claims, and encourages academic resource sharing.”
— Campus Lost & Found Portal Architecture Brief
Campus Lost & Found Portal is a centralized web platform designed for the students and faculty of ITER, Siksha 'O' Anusandhan (SOA) University, Bhubaneswar. It replaces unorganized WhatsApp and Telegram group messages with an indexed, authenticated system for recovering lost campus property and sharing academic resources.
Across large university campuses, hundreds of valuable items (identity cards, lab equipment, chargers, notebooks) are misplaced weekly. Announcements were scattered across disparate chat groups, leading to low item recovery rates, duplicate posts, and lack of accountability when claiming items.
Engineered a full-stack MERN portal with compound MongoDB indexing, JWT role-based authentication, and structured claim verification forms.
Students register with campus credentials; JWT token issued with role claims.
Item details and location tagged; persisted to MongoDB with compound indices.
Search queries executed across indexed title, category, and location fields.
Claimer submits identifying verification; poster confirms handoff.
Full-Stack MERN Architecture
Engineered modular Express.js controllers and MongoDB schemas using Mongoose, connected to a responsive React.js frontend.
Unindexed text search on full collections caused high query latency as the database grew.
Reduced query execution time by 40%, ensuring instant search filtering even under concurrent traffic.