UNESCO and Archives at Risk: Safeguarding Documentary Heritage

The Right to Know, the Right to History

• Milan Kundera (in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1981): 'the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history'.

UNESCO’s Constitution

• Maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge:

By assuring the conservation and protection of the world’s inheritance of books, works of art and monuments of history and science, and recommending to the nations concerned the necessary international conventions;

Holdings: AG 1

International Institute of Intellectual

Co-operation

Archive Group AG 3 - Preparatory Commission of UNESCO

The Activities

• Sources to the History of Nations• Technical expert missions• Capacity-building, including archival schools • Facilitating reflections on restitution of

archives (decolonization process)• Microfilm-projects – in particular in Latin

America

The Activities continued…

• RAMP-studies – reference documents• Databases and portals (CDS-ISIS)• Memory of the World – 1992 onwards• Access to Memory (ICA-AtoM) and Archivematica• UNESCO Endorsement of the Universal Declaration on

Archives in 2011• Digital Memory of the World 2012 – Vancouver

Declaration• PERSIST: UNESCO Digital Strategy for Information

Sustainability – development of a digital roadmap

UNESCO Cultural Heritage Conventions

• Protecting Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (The Hague Convention, 1954, and later protocols)

• Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (1970)

• Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972)

• UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (1995)

• Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003)

2015 Symposium: The Idea

• International Symposium: ‘Safeguarding Documentary Heritage in Danger’

• Forum for discussion – compare, review, analyze and discuss concepts, strategies and practices

• Tentatively planned 19-20 Feb 2015, 30-40 participants with diverse heritage preservation background

• Looking at the whole ‘disaster cycle’, before, during and after a conflict

2015 Symposium: Expected Outcomes

• Better understanding of concepts and issues• Analyze and share experiences and existing programs and

strategies• Emergency Action Plan for Safeguarding Endangered

Documentary Heritage• Development of guidelines on safeguarding documentary

heritage and risk management (including contingency plans)

• Publication and dissemination of guidelines• Conventions : Signed and respected• Strengthening of MoW committee network

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Questions?

Jens Boelj.boel@unesco.org

www.unesco.org/archives

Thank you !!!