CALL FOR PARTICIPATION - UNESCO Memory of the World Workshop on Strengthening Regional Cooperation and Joint Nominations, 20-21 June 2019

Background

UNESCO established the Memory of the World (MoW) programme in 1992. The programme aims to increase awareness worldwide of the existence and significance of documentary heritage, to facilitate its preservation by the most appropriate techniques, and to promote universal access to it. Documentary heritage includes textual items (books, manuscripts, documents, stone inscriptions, etc.) but also non-textual items (maps, drawings, etc.) as well as audiovisual materials (films, sound records, photographs) and electronic files (web pages, databases). To learn more about the MoW programme, please visit: https://en.unesco.org/programme/mow

The documentary heritage contains records and testimonies of the past of common significance to many countries across the world such as the records of independence, the invention of movable type printing, scientific encyclopaedia, etc. This is especially the case in Asia and the Pacific where many countries share common heritage, traditions, influence, roots of knowledge, languages and scripts.

Those areas of commonalities recorded in the documentary heritage are the foundations for strengthening regional cooperation and solidarity. However most of these archives remain unknown across the countries and are not sufficiently made accessible to raise public awareness of the significance of common heritage across the region.

Furthermore the UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Preservation of, and Access to, Documentary Heritage including in Digital Form adopted in 2015 also stresses the importance of national and international cooperation to preserve and provide access to the world’s documentary heritage.

Objectives of the workshop

Within this framework, this workshop aims at:

• Increasing participants’ knowledge on UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme and inscriptions on the International and Regional Registers
• Building capacity for the identification of shared documentary heritage and development of transnational joint nominations, and
• Promoting regional cooperation through documentary heritage and Memory of the World programme.

Conditions for participation

Participants will be from memory institutions (archives, libraries, museums, etc.) as well as private or individual collection holders in the Asia-Pacific region who have previously identified collections of documentary heritage for the purpose of joint nominations across several countries.

If you are interested to participate, please complete the participation form and send it to Ms Misako Ito, Adviser in Communication and Information, UNESCO Bangkok (m.ito@unesco.org) by 10 May 2019, indicating whether you require travel support or not. Selection will be made based on the proposal of joint nominations as well as available funding.

UNESCO will provide the lunches and coffee breaks to all participants of the training. However as the funding for travel is limited, participants are encouraged as much as possible to seek travel support to their own institutions or UNESCO field offices in Asia and the Pacific.

More information on the workshop