BEIJING — China will start to build a national online platform for archives, to make more documents available via the internet, an archive official said on March 29.

Li Minghua, head of the National Archives Administration, said at a national conference attended by directors of local archive authorities that the project would be started this year with the building of the service platform.

A long-term goal is to make the network cover the general archive agencies at all levels nationwide, he said.

Li also called for more efforts in using information technology in archive work so that more archives could be produced and managed digitally.