Items from Heavens to Seas Admitted UN World Memory Register
Thursday, 6 October 2011, 1:24 pm
Press Release: UN News
Items from the Heavens to the Seas Admitted To UN World
Memory Register
New York, Oct 5 2011 - Georgian
manuscripts from the 5th century AD, a French royal decree
from 1537, and a 20th-century astronomical study of the
nearby parts of the universe are among seven new entries to
a United Nations world heritage register.
The new admissions
bring to 245 the total number of items on Memory of the
World Register, launched by the UN Educational Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1992 to preserve
valuable archives and library collections all over the world
and ensure their wide dissemination. It includes all types
of material, including stone, celluloid, parchment and audio
recordings.
The new entries are:
First
Byurakan Survey from Armenia, with the records of a unique
astronomical survey carried out by the Byurakan
Astrophysical Observatory (BAO) from 1965-1980, involving
the largest ever astronomical study of the nearby universe
and considered one of the most important achievements of
20th-century astrophysics; Bannière Register at
Chatelet, Paris, during the reign of King François I,
covering registration and publication of legislative texts,
among them the 1537 decree by the king, for the first time
requiring printers and booksellers to deposit a copy of each
publication in the king’s library The model spread in the
17th century, supporting the growth of national libraries;
Georgian Byzantine manuscripts consisting of
1,000 works, some dating to the 5th century AD, covering
different fields but especially ecclesiastic works, kept at
the National Centre of Manuscripts in Tbilisi, Georgia’s
capital; Aral Sea Archival Fund in Kazakhstan,
consisting of files from 1965 to 1990 that record the
ecological tragedy of the Aral Sea, which has shrunk to 10
per cent of its size in the 1960s, and the attempts to
counter it; Records of the first flight across
the South Atlantic Ocean in 1922 from Portugal, containing
early reports of Captains Gago Coutinho and Sacadura
Cabral’s 1922 flight across the South Atlantic Ocean by
floatplane, a milestone in aeronautical history marking the
first use of the sextant in air navigation;
Arquivos dos Dembos/Ndembu Archives from Angola
and Portugal, comprising some 1,160 manuscripts from the
late 17th century to the early 20th century that are
uniquely valuable to scholarship in history, anthropology
and linguistics, attesting to the transformation of
essentially oral Southern African culture through the
assimilation of Portuguese and its repercussions on both
Portugal and Brazil; Landsat Program
records/Multispectral Scanner Sensor from the United States,
a unique body of images at a scale that allows observation
of the Earth’s land surfaces, coastlines, and reefs and
the natural and human-induced changes over nearly 40 years,
obtained and continuously updated by sensors onboard a
series of land-imaging satellites that began in
1972.These collections were approved provisionally by the
International Advisory Committee of the Memory of the World
Programme in May 2011 subject to the provision of minor
modifications or clarifications for full inscription to
proceed. These clarifications have now been endorsed and
UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova has approved the
inscription of the new items.
For more details go to UN
News Centre at http://www.un.org/news
ENDS
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