Data Digitization: Enhancing the utility, security and knowledge value of Bac Ninh

Data digitization is not only a story about transforming storage methods, but also a strategic step forward in knowledge management of modern governments. In Bac Ninh, the digitization of historical archives is bringing about clear results: more than 3.6 million pages of documents have been converted into electronic data, helping people and organizations to easily search, reducing processing time dozens of times, while improving security and legal value. From a bulky paper archive, Bac Ninh has been creating a "digital knowledge warehouse" - a platform to serve e-government, digital economy and digital society in the digital era.

If in the past, looking up a personal record, an administrative decision or graduate student data took hours of searching through a paper warehouse, now it only takes a few keywords and a few minutes of operation for the system to return accurate, complete and legally valid results. The case of Ms. Nguyen Thi Thu Huong, a teacher at Ngo Si Lien Secondary School, is a typical example: With the search command "Decision to end internship of Ms. Nguyen Thi Thu Huong", the file from 1993 was retrieved in less than three minutes. Or like Ms. Pham Thi Ngoc Ha, a teacher at Ngoc Son Secondary School, easily found the list of graduates from 1969-1985 in just a few search operations.

From 2022 to 2024, the Bac Ninh Department of Home Affairs has coordinated with a consulting unit to deploy the Electronic Archive Management software, perfecting the data entry, search, access authorization and change monitoring features. More than 31,300 records, equivalent to 3.3 million A4 document pages, have been digitized, mainly directive and administrative documents of the Provincial People's Committee and departments and branches in the period 1948-2014. Each year, an average of more than one million readers access the system, with 1,500 online file exploitations, demonstrating the practical application effectiveness of the electronic archive.

According to Mr. Dang Quang Son, Director of Bac Ninh Historical Archives Center No. 1, digital technology helps shorten the search time by 20-30 times compared to before, while ensuring security thanks to access control, user authorization and recording of change history. “Each document found is not only an administrative document, but also a part of preserved memory, a restored legal value and a testament to the effectiveness of digital transformation,” Mr. Son emphasized.

Building a digital knowledge base – preserving value

The project to digitize archival documents is not only to improve working methods but also to transform the model from "traditional archives" to "modern knowledge management". From a separate document warehouse, Bac Ninh Historical Archives Center No. 1 has formed an interconnected data ecosystem, where each document, resolution, official dispatch, and civil servant file is tagged and linked by time, issuing agency, field and topic. Building a "Knowledge Archive" helps users exploit information in context, opening up the ability to analyze, compile statistics and apply data for many purposes: administration, research, education , culture and law.

However, the digitization journey also faces many challenges. Some documents are up to decades old, and their physical condition is degraded, making the scanning, identification and correction of data difficult. Many documents do not have summaries, and the format is not unified, requiring time-consuming business processing. In addition, the approval of the process, appraisal and acceptance of digitized products according to current regulations also takes a long time, affecting progress. On the other hand, because the storage server is located at the Department of Science and Technology, when the transmission line has a problem, exploitation is temporarily interrupted. To date, the rate of digitized documents has only reached about 75% of the total documents stored in the warehouse (as of 2020), while each year the Center still receives a large volume of new documents.

In order to overcome this limitation and continue to expand the scale, the People's Committee of Bac Ninh province has approved the Project "Digitizing documents at the Provincial Historical Archives for the period 2025-2029" with a total budget of about 23 billion VND, aiming to digitize an additional 3.8 million A4 pages of administrative documents of the Provincial People's Committee and departments and branches. This is an important step to complete the entire digital administrative data warehouse of the province, moving towards the model of "Electronic government - electronic storage - serving electronic citizens."

According to the plan, the Department of Home Affairs will take the lead in implementing and coordinating with relevant agencies and units to ensure the accuracy, completeness and security of data. Bac Ninh Historical Archives Center No. 1 is responsible for selecting reputable technology partners, organizing specialized digitization teams, and promoting communication to guide citizens in exploiting digitized data. By mid-2025, the Center has digitized more than 330,000 pages of documents of the Provincial People's Committee and the Departments of Education & Training, Science & Technology, creating a premise for the next phase.

The highlight of the Bac Ninh model is the integration of digital storage infrastructure with multi-layered decentralized security. The system not only allows quick lookup but also tracks access logs, detects abnormalities and absolutely protects original data. This is an important criterion in the context of the Government promoting the National Data Strategy to 2030, requiring localities to transform the storage model from "keeping documents" to "data asset management".

From a broader perspective, Bac Ninh is shaping a smart storage model where past data becomes a resource for the future. When historical documents are digitized, linked and secured, they not only serve administrative work, but also create a foundation for analytical applications, forecasting, policy research and local history education.

Overall, Bac Ninh's archive digitization project demonstrates a sustainable approach to digital transformation, not only "converting paper into data", but "converting documents into knowledge, knowledge into value". When the entire process of archiving, searching and managing records is automated and transparent, Bac Ninh not only preserves the local administrative memory but also creates a data platform for a smart government, serving people and businesses more effectively in the digital age./.

Center for Science and Technology Communication

Source: https://mst.gov.vn/so-hoa-du-lieu-nang-cao-tien-ich-bao-mat-va-gia-tri-tri-thuc-cua-bac-ninh-197251021190245633.htm