Changes in functions, duties, and personnel; the handover and receipt of records and documents; and the resolution of backlogged materials from merged or dissolved agencies and organisations are posing urgent challenges for clerical and archival work. Without comprehensive solutions, there is a risk of information leakage, work disruption, and even the loss or unlawful destruction of valuable documents.
Reports compiled by the Departments of Home Affairs in several provinces, such as Cao Bang and Dien Bien, and submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs, indicate that at the commune level, there is a shortage of specialised equipment for digitalising records and documents. Some newly established communes, formed after administrative rearrangements, lack standard-compliant storage facilities and are temporarily using warehouses or rooms that do not meet fire safety, temperature, and humidity requirements. There is also a lack of specialised preservation equipment.
At present, there are no uniform and detailed guidelines for handling state secrets or specific types of specialised documents, such as maps, cadastral records, and construction design files during sealing and handover. Large volumes of unprocessed, unclassified documents from former district-level units and old commune-level units remain, making it impossible to fully digitalise these collections within the urgent timeframe set by the central government.
In addition, many officials and civil servants have not been trained or provided with professional instruction, leaving them without practical experience, IT knowledge, document management skills, or archival expertise when undertaking the digitalisation of records and documents.
The digitalisation and management of archives require a synchronised, interconnected digitalisation and storage infrastructure to ensure long-term storage, backup, and data recovery capabilities, while guaranteeing that data remains secure and unaltered during transmission.
Such infrastructure must employ advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) to automate digitalisation processes, classify documents, extract metadata, reduce errors, and increase processing speed; blockchain technology to ensure the integrity, authenticity, and traceability of digital documents; cloud computing platforms to store, manage, and access digital archives, allowing for scalable storage capacity and secure remote access; and big data analytics tools to handle massive volumes of documents, extract informational value from archives, and provide reports and statistics to support management and operations.
This task is urgent and requires significant resources, with many localities considering it their greatest current challenge. Therefore, alongside public investment, policies are needed to encourage technology enterprises to participate in providing digitalisation solutions, archival management software, and cloud storage services under public–private partnership (PPP) arrangements.
Such measures will help reduce pressure on the State budget while leveraging advanced technology from the private sector. Accordingly, efforts should focus on developing digital storage and document management services in cooperation with technology enterprises to ensure sustainability and economic efficiency; implementing pilot PPP projects to expand and upgrade the national digital storage platform into a shared platform; and piloting digitalisation projects for archives in selected localities in collaboration with technology companies to assess effectiveness and scale up nationwide.
According to the Department of State Records and Archives (Ministry of Home Affairs), due to the enormous volume of paper documents that need processing at the local level, steps for classification and determining economic–technical norms under current regulations should be reviewed, shortened, and optimised to ensure feasibility.
For local documents, priority should first be given to digitalising types that serve the daily needs of citizens and the information requirements of leaders at all levels, such as land and housing records, civil status, judicial matters, healthcare, and public administrative procedures.
During this process, it is necessary to establish a system to monitor the effectiveness of digitalisation and archive management, using data analytics tools to assess progress, quality, and the impact on the operational efficiency of state agencies, economic–social development, and the satisfaction of citizens and businesses.
