Personal files, biographical information, inquiries etc.

The UNESCO Archives collected references to documents which concern the organization and its activities but are preserved in other repositories than the UNESCO Archives. In some cases, copies of these documents were acquired by UNESCO and are available in the archives.

Collection consists of relevant research on the Organization (dissertations, papers, articles etc.), mostly done by scholars who used the archives for their research work. Researchers are asked to send a copy of their work back to the Archives which then registers it sequentially under the three series in this Collection.

The photographic archives span the period from the foundation of UNESCO until 2000 and contain photographic material of UNESCO programmes, activities, and events (conferences, meetings, Director General visits). In addition, the photo archives consist of images used for exhibitions or publications of UNESCO (e.g. the UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition prints and negatives found in the series MC).

The collection consists of UNESCO records that were routed to and organized by a centralized Registry Section. The principal and system of classification used by the Registry was Universal Decimal Classification. The collection is further organized into three series based on three chronological periods: 1946-1956; 1957-1966; and 1967 to roughly 1989.

In the course of its activities, UNESCO enters into legal agreements with member states, international and regional organizations, non-governmental organizations, universities, foundations, private companies and individuals. UNESCO’s General Conference also adopts international standard-setting instruments, including, so far, twenty-nine conventions, thirty-two recommendations, and thirteen declarations. In addition to this, UNESCO can be the designated depository for instruments adopted by other intergovernmental conferences. Member states then issue and send legal instruments to UNESCO in reponse to these standard-setting instruments. The Collection consists of legal instruments transferred to the Archives and registered by Archives staff in one of the following three series: A) Instruments signed with member states; B) Instruments signed with organizations, companies and private individuals; and C) Donations, bequests and legacies.

In 2004 UNESCO launched an electronic records management initiative in order to archive the growing number of e-mails and electronic documents. The collection is arranged based on the Secretariat's classification system for electronic records.

Works issued by National Commissions under agreement with the UNESCO Secretariat. Some of these are translations of publications issued by UNESCO itself.

Periodicals of the UNESCO Staff Associations until 1980:

Published by the STA/STU

• Mercury, from 1946-1948

• UNESCO Staff Association Bulletin, from 1949-1955

• Opinion, from 1955-1980 (at UNESCO Archives), copies of all exemplars until today kept by the STU

• Consenus, Newsletter of the ISAU, kept in their archives

• Lien/Link, Newsletter of the AFUS, kept in their archives

Works published by UNESCO itself under its own imprint (complete until December 1971, afterwards some publications might be missing or only be available in the UNESCO library)

Works issued by other publishers under contract with UNESCO, with or without financial assistance, in the original version or in translation

Since 2004, the UNESCO Archives and Records Management Unit crawled the UNESCO portal and archived approximately three snapshots of the UNESCO Internet and Intranet per year with some snapshots of field office websites as well. From 2010 onwards, the regularly scheduled snapshots have ceased and captures are now done on request of the unit or office. The snapshots contain the html-contents of the portal while all other file formats, such as .pdf, .doc, etc. are excluded from the crawls. The structure is then reconstructed by sector or office. The collection is arranged in two main series: Intranet pages and Internet pages.

The UNESCO film archives consist of an estimated 12,000 film cans (4,000 hours of film) on 16- and 35-mm acetate film, dating from the 1940s to the 1980s. They are divided into three parts:

• The archives of film productions, containing about 7500 film cans of material produced by UNESCO itself.

• The archives of reference films, containing about 1100 works which not have been produced by UNESCO itself but have been given to the organisation by NGOs, foreign film producers or member states.

• The archives of distributed films, containing around 2500 copies of 210 films. These films have been produced by the organisation and concern different programmes or projects.

Online search of a portion of Unesco film material is possible via: UNESCO Archives Multimedia Database. Digitizing Our Shared Unesco History

All other film material is indexed in an electronic database, originally created and maintained by the Division of Public Information.

For questions regarding access to the film archives, or to request a search for film titles in the electronic database, please contact: archives@unesco.org

The sound records contain mostly sound recordings of conferences and other events, speeches of the Director General and other important persons, but also music recordings, interviews and the UNESCO radio programs.