The Taicang government archive was recently honored as a nationwide top-class digital archive. The designation of the award followed two days of tests and appraisals from the State Archives Administration.

On July 3 and 4, a team of technical experts scoured through 250 indexes and 99 key indicators in the system before they deemed the Taicang archive to meet the national standards for such facilities.

The award means that Taicang has become the first county-level city to have a high-quality digital archive. The archive's network comprises of government agencies' internal lines, local area networks and the Internet. It also expands to every household in every village.

Taicang first moved to digitalize its file catalogues in 1999. Four years later in 2003, it began converting its texts in digital form.

By the end of 2011, the Taicang archive had successfully digitalized all files in its custody.

In April 2012, it became a 5A digital archive, the first in Jiangsu province at the time.

In 2014, villagers were able to access civil affairs records without having to step outside of the village. They were also able to have file contents certificated remotely.