The public library system in Việt Nam is headed by the National Library.

According to the Library Ordinance promulgated on 28 December 2000, the National Library is empowered to work as the central library throughout the country, with the following responsibilities: (i) to exploit domestic and foreign sources to meet the needs of readers; (ii) to collect legal deposit publications; (iii) to build up and preserve the national collection; (iv) to compile and publish the National Bibliography and General Bibliography of Việt Nam; (v) to provide readers with library and information services; (vi) to co-operate and exchange materials with domestic and foreign libraries; (vii) to study library and information science and technology; (viii) to improve the expertise and professional skills of librarians; and (ix) to provide professional guidance to libraries throughout the country.

As noted above, in 2001 the National Library underwent a substantial upgrade with the completion of a new US$6 million extension which extended the available space to a total area of 2,000 square metres, creating many new reading rooms, and greatly expanded climatised storage space for more than three million documents.

Still the country’s only national deposit library, the National Library of Việt Nam is a reference library which offers no lending services. It houses a national collection of over one million printed books, including 2,700 rare books in the ideographic script known as chữ nôm, 9,000 doctoral theses and 8,000 periodical titles. At the time of writing the National Library has a total of 110 staff (80 per cent of whom are university graduates) and serves a readership of over 6,000.

Computers have been installed in the National Library and several other major libraries since 1992, and as part of its recent upgrade the National Library has made substantial progress with automation, establishing a Local Area Network (LAN) to link all its divisions and a Wide Area Network (WAN) to connect it to all of the provincial and municipal libraries around the country. As yet only a few branch (district) libraries are linked by WAN, but subject to funding and progress with the standardisation of information retrieval across the network the long term objective is that all of the public libraries in the country should ultimately be part of the WAN.

For decades the National Library and all of the public libraries in Việt Nam have used the Soviet BBK (Bibliotech Bibliography Classification) system. but a locally-adapted version of Dewey Decimal is currently being developed for application across the entire network.

Other important developments of recent years include the launch in 1987 of a National Bibliography, which now accounts for some 130,000 books, 6,000 current periodical titles, 1,700 historical periodicals and 3,000 doctoral theses; the creation since 1993 of the Việt Nam Union Catalogue (VUC) of quốc ngữ titles held in the major libraries of Việt Nam, France, Australia and the United States; and since 1994 the South East Asian Microfilm (SEAM) project, which has created modern microfilming facilities in Hà Nội with a view to filming the most important documents in the National Library, the National Records and Archives Department, the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies and the Institute of Social Sciences Information.