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International Conference on Safeguarding and Increasing Access to the Documentary Heritage of the Silk Routes

The International Conference on Safeguarding and Increasing Access to the Documentary Heritage of the Silk Routes has been held in Fuzhou, China, from the 6-8 November 2018. The meeting was organised by the National Archives of China, in cooperation with the East Asian Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (EASTICA), and hosted by the Fujian Provincial Archives.

The meeting brought together delegates from China, SAR Hong Kong, SAR Macau, Japan, Korea and Mongolia to share information the different documentary heritage relating to the Silk Road and Spice Routes held in their collections, and then discussing cooperation strategies for safeguarding and increasing access to them.

A number of MOWCAP Bureau members and Special Advisors were invited to participate and speak at the seminar, including: Misako Ito, who gave an overview of UNESCO’s Silk Road initiatives; Ray Edmondson, who shared an update on the current state of the MoW program; and Andrew Henderson, who outlined how MOWCAP acts to support regional cooperation for documentary heritage preservation/access.

An exhibition on Documentary Heritage Along the Silk Road was also held in conjunction with the seminar at the Fujian Provincial Archives. The exhibition featured documents from the National Archives of Chine, some of which had never been exhibited before.

The program from the seminar can be found here.

Announcements of Grants for Documentary Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region

The UNESCO Memory of the World Committee for Asia Pacific (MOWCAP) is pleased to announce the results of the 2018 round of the MOWCAP-Asia Culture Centre (ACC) Grants Program.

The Program will support eight organizations from the Asia Pacific region to undertake projects to safeguard and make their documentary heritage collections accessible (details of the projects supported can be found below).

Grants were awarded to organizations from Timor-Leste, the Philippines, Tuvalu, Fiji, Myanmar, Vietnam, Iran and Malaysia. Applications were received from over 20 Asia-Pacific organizations.

The generous financial support of the Asia Culture Centre (ACC), and operational support of the Asia Culture Institute (ACI), has made these grants possible.

[Read more…]

Tuol Sleng Records Being Digistised

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archive was inscribed on the Asia Pacific Memory of the World Register in 2008 and on the International Memory of the World Register in 2009.

A digitisation project is now underway with the objective of  preserving  about 400,000 records from Pol Pot’s brutal regime. The digitisation of about 400,000 pages of documents will be complete in two years. A  database and website for families of the victims and researchers will also be created.

The project is supported by the Korea International Cooperation Agency  through UNESCO and will finish at the end of 2019.

On 28 September the Khmer Times  published an update of the project.

Audiovisual Archiving, Philosophy and Principles

The publication “Audiovisual Archiving, Philosophy and  Principles”  is now available in five languages: Chinese    English  Japanese  Portuguese and  Spanish.

The English text was written by Dr Ray Edmondson and released as a third edition in 2016.

The book was published under UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme, and provides the rationale and theoretical basis of audiovisual archiving. It has been updated to reflect the contemporary realities faced by practitioners in the field.

Celebrating Twenty Years of MOWCAP Inscriptions

The Memory of the World: Documentary Heritage on the Asia-Pacific Register is a detailed guide to the 46 items of documentary heritage listed on the Asia Pacific regional register of the Memory of the World up until 2016.

The regional register for Memory of the World was established in 2008. Between 2008 and 2016,  46 items of documentary heritage from 23 countries were inscribed onto the register. The register contains a rich variety of documentary heritage, reflecting the immense cultural, linguistic, economic and political diversity of the Asia-Pacific region.

The publication was made possible through the support of UNESCO Bangkok, the City of Andong, and technical support from the Korean Studies Institute and Korean National Commission for UNESCO, as well as a number of MoW experts.

Meeting on the UNESCO Category 2 International Centre

Second Expert Consultation Meeting on the UNESCO Category 2 International Centre for Documentary Heritage, Cheongju, Republic of Korea, 28-30 September 2018

A new UNESCO Category 2 Centre for Documentary Heritage was approved by General Conference in 2017, to be established in the city of Cheongju, Republic of Korea, as the International Centre for Documentary Heritage (ICDH).

As part of the development of the ICDH, a number of MoW experts participated in a consultation meeting in Paris in April 2018, followed in late September by a second meeting in Cheongju that coincided with the award of the Jikji Prize.

The expert group – Dr Ray Edmondson, Mr Jan Bos, Ms Joie Springer, Professor Kyung-ho Suh, Mr Papa Momar Diop, Dr Ramesh Gaur, and Dr Roslyn Russell ‒ provided feedback on the ICDH planning process before the workshop. This was discussed further in Cheongju at meetings that also included representatives of the National Archives of Korea and the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, and Dr Fackson Banda, Programme Specialist for the MoW Programme. The group also visited the World Heritage-listed Beopjusa Temple, and crafted lotus-shaped lanterns.

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Asia-Pacific Workshop Held in Seoul July 2018

Dr Roslyn Russell provided this report on the nomination workshop held in Seoul in July 2018

Delegates from Afghanistan, the Cook Islands, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Samoa, Singapore, Tajikistan, and Tuvalu gathered in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in July this year for the biannual workshop to improve nominations to the Memory of the World registers. The workshop was organised by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO and the Cultural Heritage Administration of the Republic of Korea.

The participating delegates worked on improving draft nominations. Presentations on the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme and the nomination process were given by a group of MoW experts that included MOWCAP members Dr Ray Edmondson, Dr Helen Jarvis, Professor Kyung-ho Suh and Dr Roslyn Russell; and Mr Jan Bos, Chair of the Register Sub-Committee for the International Register, and Ms Joie Springer, former Chief of Secretariat of Memory of the World in UNESCO Paris.

[Read more…]

Ten New Inscriptions on MOWCAP Register

Ten new inscriptions to the MOWCAP register were approved at the MOWCAP 8th General Meeting held in Gwangju, Republic of Korea, from 29 May – 31 May.

-Agreements with Native Governments (1893-1916), Tuvalu
-The Anandacandra Stone Inscription, Republic of the Union of Myanmar
-The Archives of Nanyang Volunteer Drivers and Mechanics, People’s Republic of China
-Culion Leprosy Archives, Republic of the Philippines
-The Envoyship Journeys to China, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
-The Four Treatises of Tibetan Medicine, People’s Republic of China
-Maninso: Ten Thousand People’s Petitions, Republic of Korea
-The Emerald Jungle (Mya Ga Naing), Republic of the Union of Myanmar
-Name Boards and Verse Plaques on Royal Architecture of the Joseon Dynasty, Republic of Korea.
-World War Two Records – British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP), Solomon Islands

UNESCO and Inria open the Archive of the Digital Age

UNESCO Press Release No.2018-48

Softwareheritage.org, UNESCO and Inria open the Archive of the Digital Age

Paris, 06 June—UNESCO and Inria will open the archive of Softwareheritage.org, a worldwide initiative to create a universal library of computer programme source codes since the dawn of the digital age on June 7.

One year after the signing of a partnership agreement between Inria and UNESCO, the launch event at UNESCO’s Headquarters on 7 June (3 to 4.30 pm), will include a demonstration of the website’s functions, with the participation of François Sillion, Chief Executive Officer of the French National Institute for computer science and applied mathematics (Inria).
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