Nominations open for Memory of the World Regional Register for Asia and the Pacific

Owners and custodians of documentary heritage—both institutional and private can submit materials in various formats, including paper, inscriptions, engravings, tapes, film, and digital storage.

Eligibility Criteria

• Nominations must fulfill at least one of the following criteria:
  • Historical Significance: What does the documentary heritage tell people in relation to the history of the Asia Pacific region as a whole. For example, does it deal with:
    • Political or economic developments,
    • Social or spiritual movements;
    • Eminent personalities in the history of the Asia Pacific region;
    • Events of world-changing importance;
    • Specific places relating to times, events or people.
  • Artistic or stylistic importance: Significance may lie in the physical nature of the documentary heritage. For example:
    • The documentary heritage may be a particularly fine example of its type;
    • It may have outstanding qualities of beauty and craftsmanship;
    • It may be a new or unusual type of carrier;
    • It may be an example of a type of document that is now obsolete or superseded.
  • Social, community or spiritual relevance: It may be that the documentary heritage attached to a specific existing community is demonstrably significant. For example:
    • A community (or a specific part of that community, clan, tribe or family etc.) may strongly relate to the heritage of a beloved (or even a feared or hated) ancestor, spiritual leader, saint, prophet or leader, or to a specific incident, event or site.
    • UNESCO encourages submissions that highlight the heritage of Indigenous, minority, and marginalized groups and address gender-related documentary heritage.

Ineligibility Criteria

• Papers of contemporary political leaders and political parties: Normally, these would be relevant to national MoW registers, according to the due decisions of their MoW committees.
• National constitutions and similar documents: Normally, these would be appropriate candidates for national MoW registers, because their influence is usually restricted to the country concerned.
• “Whole of institution” nominations: While the nomination of a collection, a fonds or a group of collections or fonds is welcome, the nomination of the entire contents of a memory institution is unlikely to be successful, unless it demonstrates a significance, unity and coherence beyond the coincidence of material which happens to reside in the same institution.
• A severely degraded document, if its content and character have been compromised beyond the possibility of restoration.
• Vaguely described or open-ended nominations.
• Any documents that promote issues and ideas in opposition to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and of the UNESCO Constitution and/or promote any form of denial of human rights, foster hate speech or promote racist or discriminatory rhetoric.

Nomination Criteria

• The documentary heritage may be publicly or privately owned.
• For practical reasons, nominations are limited to three per country in each two-year cycle.
• Two or more nominators in different Member States may submit joint nominations where collections or groupings are divided among owners/custodians.
• Custodian: Where the nominator/s are not also the owner/s and or custodian/s, the owner/s and or custodian/s would normally need to consent to the nomination.
• A nominated bibliographical or archival collection or fonds must be finite, with clear beginning and end dates, and must be closed.
• Where documentary heritage exists in more than one copy or in similar but variant versions, the nomination shall be deemed to apply to the work itself, rather than just the specific copy or copies proposed for nomination.
• Nominations should be comprehensive but no longer than necessary: they are judged by quality, not quantity.
• Pictures, lists, graphics or digital files can be added as appendices when needed, and these can be very helpful to the RSC and MOWCAP General Meeting’s assessment.

Assessment Criteria

• Assessment is comparative and relative: There is no absolute measure of cultural significance.
• Authenticity and integrity: The threshold test of authenticity is whether the documentary heritage being nominated is really what it purports to be and not corrupted from the original.

For more information, visit UNESCO.