THE Manila city government is set to digitize all ordinances, resolutions and other legislative records of the city council, beginning with the resolutions passed by the early municipal board that was established in 1901 to the current 12th city council.

The move will make ordinances more accessible to the public and “will have great historical significance,” Vice Mayor John Marvin “Yul Servo” Nieto, the council’s chairman and presiding officer, said.

Nieto principally authored the resolution that called for the creation of a Technical Working Group (TWG) to provide administrative and technical support to the Committee on Information Technology in carrying out the digitalization of the ordinances.

The resolution received the full support of the city council.

Since the establishment of the Municipal Board in 1901, thousands of ordinances and resolutions have been passed. These measures, however, are largely inaccessible to the general public, owing to the difficulty and inconvenience in obtaining hard copies, especially ancient ones kept in other offices such as the National Archives of the Philippines, Nieto said in his resolution.

“Such relative inaccessibility often makes the enforcement of certain ordinances difficult, as a consequence of the public’s lack of knowledge thereof,” the vice mayor pointed out.

To address the situation, Nieto proposed that the Committee on Information Technology of the City Council, in cooperation with the Office of the Vice Mayor and the Office of the Secretary to the City Council, spearhead the digitalization of legislative records, scanning thousands of ordinances and the creation of a website where they could be accessed by the general public.

He said after a series of consultations and collaborative meetings, the offices concerned agreed to create a TWG headed by the Secretary to the City Council to assist the committee in pursuing the digitalization program.