The Archive Group is composed of the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (IICI) fonds.

The Archive Group consists of publications produced or funded by the UNESCO Secretariat from the foundation of UNESCO in 1946 until now. The Archival Group is arranged into three collections:

• Works published directly by UNESCO under its own imprint (complete until December 1971, afterwards some publications might be missing);
• Works published through financial or other forms of assistance from UNESCO;
  -Works issued by National Commissions under agreement with the UNESCO Secretariat (for the most part these are translations of publications issued by UNESCO).

The Archive Group does not contain publications relating to UNESCO and its activities written independently of the Organization. This also applies to any publications of National Commissions which are not translations or adaptations of UNESCO publications and were not issued under contract.

The Archive Group consists of coded official documents issued by the Secretariat and then transferred to the Archives.

The Archive Group includes the documents of all Executive Boards from 1946 onwards.
For every session of the EXB, the following kinds of documents exist:

• EX - Main series: These documents are published on white paper in six working languages of the EXB. On the first page, there is always a summary of the document. At the end of this summary, the paragraph of the draft decision is noted.
• EX/INF - Information documents: These are published also on white paper, but only in English and French.
• EX/PRIV - Private documents: The private documents are on yellow paper. On the left hand side, they are marked as “confidential” and their distribution is limited (20-year rule applies for access to these documents in the documents).
• Draft decisions: Draft decisions are on pink paper. On the right hand side, the reference code DR is joined to the other codes in reference to their submission. Under the item, the names of the countries which presented the DR are noted.
• Decisions: The final edition is published in the month following the session.
• Summary records: these documents are prepared in the six working languages of the Board. A summary of speeches made in Arabic, Chinese, Russian or Spanish is published in the original language, followed by the translation into English or French. They are published in provisional form to be distributed to Members for possible amendments. They are then issued in a single document that forms the definitive version.

Documents of the Conference for the Establishment of UNESCO (ECO/CONF) from 1945 are included with the General Conference Documents, starting from 1946.

The archives of the Commission can be divided into two main parts: Official Documents and correspondence files.
It should be noted that documents and copies of documents were often put into the files. In some cases there is no printed document, or, in a few cases, the existing original typescript has been bound with the documents. If a document is missing from the bound volumes, the original could also possibly be found in the file. Therefore, it is important to consult both the documents and files.

The documents, by their nature as working tools of the Commission members, Member Governments and the Staff, exist in several copies and were distributed to all those mentioned above.

The Archive Group contains the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education fonds.

The Archive Group is composed of archives of UNESCO Field Offices, Institutes and Centres which have been transferred to the UNESCO Archives in the Headquarters building in Paris. It further includes a collection of information about the archival holdings which are kept by the Field units themselves (copies of inventories, lists, questionnaires, descriptions etc.).

Secretariat records, as separate from Secretariat Documents issued with official document codes, include programme files, project files, division files, registry files, administrative files, and working files. The Archival Group is comprised of the following collections and fonds:

-Legal instruments (LA) Collection: agreements, conventions, recommendations, final acts, plans of operation, protocols, contracts, statutes, credentials, full powers of the Delegates of the General Conference, etc., that have been transferred to the Archives.

-Central Registry Collection: official correspondence files (also called 'registry files' and 'subject files on programme maters') contianing documents collected from Secretariat units and organized according to a subject-based classification scheme by the former Registry Section.

-Secretariat fonds: records created and maintained by the organizational units of the Secretariat in the course of their activities, such as, for example, the Executive Office of the Director General (CAB), Bureau of Studies and Programming (BEP, PSP), Secretariat of the General Conference and the Executive Board (SCX), etc. The fonds includes records of committees and commissions that reported to the Director-General.

The photo and audiovisual archives consist of analogue and digital records dating from 1945 up until the present day.

• Photographs: 140,000 black and white negatives; 1,000 colour 35mm négatives; 29,000 35mm colour slides; 15,000 duplicate cover slides; photographic prings, 1945 to the present.

• Films: 12,500 cans, containing over 1,000 titles, 1951 onwards.

• Sound recordings: 30,000 reels, including UNESCO Radio reports and interviews, and event and programme recordings, 1940s to 1980s.

• Video tapes: 5,000 tapes, corresponding to 2,500 titles, 1983 onwards.

A part of UNESCO's film and sound recordings, documenting UNESCO events and meetings since 1945, are kept in the UNESCO Phonothèque of the Sound and Telephone unit.

Microcopies of official documents

The Archive Group contains publications, articles, films, research, documents and records about UNESCO, its purpose and its activities. It also contains a number of small private fonds of former staff members, consultants, and delegates.

The archival holdings of the UNESCO Staff Associations concern all activities of the associations (cultural activities, journeys, sports, gala, tombolas, incl. photos of the events), the relations between the association and the Director General, the resolutions of the Staff Assembly and social questions. The fonds further contains all correspondence files with internal and external correspondence partners, the donated personal files of staff members, the circular letters of the STA and all documents and records of commissions and committees about staff issues.

This Archive Group refers to a project of the Culture Sector from 1949 to ca. 1979. Since 1949, UNESCO, with the assistance of its National Commissions, made contact with publishers of reproductions of famous paintings throughout the world. The reproductions were examined and the publishers were then listed as sources for accurate reproductions of masterpieces of world art. The reproductions could then be purchased and disseminated, rendering the masterpieces accessible to the world. UNESCO then published several catalogues and maintained a collection (called "Archives of Colour Reproductions of Paintings") which contained all reproductions received as samples.
The idea of the UNESCO project was to give the vast majority of people who never or only occasionally have the chance to see the originals of great paintings access to them by substituting these art works with high-quality colour reproductions.
With the aim of making the best colour reproductions more easily available to teachers, students and the general art-interested public, UNESCO, over a period of 30 years, produced catalogues listing by the end more than 15,000 paintings of which high-quality reproductions exist and could be obtained. The volumes were intended not only to bring art into homes and schools but also to encourage the increased production of colour prints and the improvement of reproduction standards and methods.
At UNESCO Headquarters complete sets of the prints were kept so that visitors would have been able to see the reproductions themselves.
The main criteria by which the prints have been chosen were the fidelity of the reproduction, the significance of the artist, and the importance of the original painting. The selection had been done by two committees of experts set up in agreement with the International Council of Museums that decided which reproductions should be included in UNESCO’s catalogue and collection.

The Archive Group has three fonds:
-Archives of the Intergovernmental Bureau for Informatics (IBI)
-Archives of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (ICPHS / CIPSH)
-Part of the archives of the African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD), from the years 1961 to 1973, 2 boxes

In 2004, UNESCO launched an electronic records management initiative in order to archive the growing number of e-mails and electronic documents. The same year, the Archives and Records Management Unit started to regularly crawl the UNESCO portal and to archive snapshots of Internet and Intranet three times a year. The Archive Group consists of two collections: the Electronic records collection and the Web archives collection.