Ho Chi Minh City launches initiative to digitize decades of archival records

In her interview with SGGP Newspaper, Director of the HCMC Department of Home Affairs Pham Thi Thanh Hien firmly asserted that digitization isn’t merely about converting paper documents into electronic copies.

It’s absolutely imperative to create a unified digital archival database that is easily searchable, exploitable, and connectable, ultimately serving to properly manage, operate, and assist citizens alongside enterprises. At the end of the day, this stands as a concrete task needed to realize the overarching goals of administrative reform and digital government construction.

Stemming from recent organizational restructuring, the HCMC Department of Home Affairs has identified digitizing archival records as a pressing task with profound significance for state management.

Following the reshuffle, the sheer volume of documents managed by the city is monumental, spanning over 227,300 meters of shelving. This constitutes a repository of immense value that inherently ties into state administration and securely safeguards the legitimate rights of citizens and businesses.

Based on that foundation, the Department proactively advised the HCMC People’s Committee to promulgate a massive digitization project for records spanning 1975 to June 2025. Concurrently, they advised on specific deployment roadmaps, ensuring agencies execute them synchronously.

Director Pham Thi Thanh Hien noted the city’s stringent requirements to form comprehensive, accurate, and highly usable data. She warned that if paper is merely converted into electronic files without proper standardization, it’s clear the digitization’s efficacy will remain severely limited. Consequently, the Department of Home Affairs has firmly established uniform guidelines from the initial input stage to the final product.

Firstly, agencies must meticulously review and determine document volumes prior to processing. Subsequently, there must be a completely unified approach regarding professional workflows, indexing, and data structures.

The Department explicitly demands rigorous control over post-digitization quality and data exploitation capabilities, rather than just blindly checking scanned page counts. The ultimate goal ensures officials can rapidly search and seamlessly share data across jurisdictions, genuinely serving overarching state management and administrative resolutions.

The city has set a stringent target to completely digitize 100 percent of archival documents from the past three years prior to September 30, 2026. To securely lock in this objective, the Department of Home Affairs is actively guiding local units to construct robust implementation plans and meticulously select qualifying documents.

It has strongly required agencies to zero in on pivotal tasks such as pinpointing document volumes, drafting precise financial estimates, and properly organizing the final product acceptance to get the ball rolling on schedule.

While defining the timeline is undeniably crucial, the ultimate quality of the data and its exploitation efficiency post-digitization are actually even more paramount. Therefore, the Department will persistently monitor progress and help agencies untangle frustrating administrative bottlenecks.

“The city is completely willing to accept a massive investment expenditure today to forge a data infrastructure with profound, long-term value for the future. This bold move aims to transform the archival document resources formed across various historical periods into a robust data asset serving the city’s governance, citizens, and local businesses.”

Director of the HCMC Department of Home Affairs Pham Thi Thanh Hien

The Director then informed the methods carried out by the HCMC Department of Home Affairs as the presiding agency to guarantee the procedures, standards, and overall quality of this digitization.

It’ll aggressively advise the HCMC People’s Committee to unify workflows and technical standards. It’ll also rigorously guide and synthesize progress to promptly clear up any hurdles. It’ll proactively coordinate efforts to ensure post-digitization data isn't fragmented, remaining highly searchable and efficiently utilized.

However, the Department can’t completely shoulder the responsibilities of every single local agency. There must be seamless coordination coupled with the responsibility to meticulously direct the project’s deployment.

Consequently, local departments and boards must bear direct responsibility for organizing the digitization of records falling neatly under their jurisdiction. They are held strictly accountable for the schedule, data quality, and the efficient utilization of allocated funds.

The Department strongly requests ward and commune committees to accurately determine document volumes, orchestrating quality control strictly according to established guidelines.

For local leaders, the mandate is clear. Agency heads must take full responsibility for their locality’s outcomes, rather than just passing the buck to service providers. They absolutely can’t let the digitized data become locked in a “closed data warehouse.” Instead, they must step-by-step integrate it with the city’s shared electronic archival system.

Once the project officially wraps up, this will become a paramount data source serving administrative reform and the ambitious construction of HCMC’s digital government. It lays down a highly valuable, long-lasting digital foundation that robustly serves authorities, citizens, and local businesses.