Bac Ninh creates 'digital knowledge warehouse' to serve e-government

Illustration photo.

Building a digital knowledge repository, preserving document value

During the period from 2022 to 2024, the Bac Ninh Department of Home Affairs has coordinated with a consulting unit to deploy the Electronic Archive Management software. This software has completed important features such as data entry, search, access authorization and change monitoring.

To date, more than 31,300 files, equivalent to 3.3 million A4 pages, have been digitized. These documents are mainly directive and administrative documents of the Provincial People's Committee and departments and branches in the period from 1948 to 2014.

To date, the system has proven its practical application effectiveness. While in the past, searching for a personal profile, an administrative decision, or graduate student data required hours of searching in paper archives, now the system can return accurate, complete, and legally valid results with just a few keywords and a few minutes of operation. Digital technology has helped shorten the search time by 20-30 times compared to traditional methods. The storage system also ensures security by controlling access, assigning user rights, and recording change history. Thanks to that, on average, each year the system records more than one million readers and 1,500 online profile exploitations.

The digital transformation project in document storage is marking an important step forward from the “traditional storage” method to the “modern knowledge management” system. Bac Ninh Historical Archives Center No. 1 has built a linked data ecosystem instead of continuing to maintain a separate document repository. In this system, documents such as texts, resolutions, official dispatches and civil servant records are tagged and linked based on time factors, issuing agencies, fields and topics. By creating a “Knowledge Archive”, users can access information in specific contexts, thereby opening up opportunities to apply data to many different purposes, including administration, research, education , culture and law, while improving analytical and statistical capabilities.

Challenges and expansion plan for the period 2025 - 2029

According to the Center for Science and Technology Communication, despite many remarkable achievements, the digitization journey still faces many challenges. Some documents are decades old and seriously damaged, making scanning, identifying and correcting data difficult. The lack of summaries or inconsistent formats of many documents also creates a time-consuming workload for business processing. The approval, appraisal and acceptance process of digitized products according to current regulations is prolonged, affecting the progress of implementation. In addition, temporary interruptions in data exploitation sometimes occur due to transmission problems from the storage server at the Department of Science and Technology. As of the end of 2020, the rate of digitized documents only reached about 75% of the total documents stored in the warehouse, while new documents continue to be received every year.

In order to overcome these shortcomings 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". This project is estimated to cost about 23 billion VND, and the goal is to digitize an additional 3.8 million pages of administrative documents from 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 closer to the model of "Electronic government - electronic storage - serving electronic citizens".

The Department of Home Affairs will be the lead agency in implementing the Project, coordinating with relevant agencies and units to ensure the accuracy, integrity and security of data. Bac Ninh Historical Archives Center No. 1 will select reputable technology partners, organize specialized teams on digitization and promote communication to guide citizens on how to exploit digital data. By mid-2025, the Center has completed the digitization of more than 330,000 pages of documents of the Provincial People's Committee and the Departments of Education & Training, Science & Technology, creating a solid foundation for the next phase.

Shaping smart government

The Bac Ninh model stands out for its integration of digital storage infrastructure and multi-layered decentralized security. This system not only allows for quick data retrieval but also has the ability to track access logs, detect abnormalities and absolutely protect original data. This is an important factor 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”.

Bac Ninh is building a smart storage model, with the goal of turning historical data into valuable resources for the future. When historical documents are digitized, linked and secured, they will not only serve administrative work but also create a solid foundation for applications in analysis, forecasting, policy research and local history education.

Hien Thao

Source: https://doanhnghiepvn.vn/chuyen-doi-so/bac-ninh-tao-kho-tri-thuc-so-phuc-vu-chinh-quyen-dien-tu/20251022042704967